The 2008 campaign in viral video

JibJab has been a rite of passage for political campaigns (particularly presidential politics) for years, but there’s a lot of recent talk about the effect of Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin generating some of the highest ratings that Saturday Night Live has had in years… and, similarly, some rather amazing traffic figures for NBC’s web site.

Increasingly, we’re starting to wonder whether online videos are getting to the point where, like the sales of Halloween masks of the candidates, the candidate with the most hits wins. There’s a bit of precedent to this already, where the 2006 Virginia senate race appears to have been strongly influenced by a viral video of then-incumbent Senator George Allen making a racial slur at a supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb (one of the current senators from Virginia, having beaten Allen by a slim margin).

Could it be that politics are now decided largely by quick, but highly influential, videos for those of us with short attention spans? Is this a good thing for democracy? Is this evolutionary or devolutionary?