Responding Inkind

One of the big rules of political advertising is to make sure no attack goes unresponded to on the same medium. Online videos and viral marketing can make that tough to do. In the factcheck on the Bush online video attacking Kerry shows the problem. The Bush campaign sent a misleading video to 6 million, then add to that the number of times the video was forwarded, and its even more. How does Kerry respond? He can't respond because he doesn't have Bush's list and he doesn't know who it was forwarded to. He could send it to his list, but there is probably very little overlap between the two. Beyond that, there is no accountability, sure there is factcheck.org, but it's a small site, if it was a TV ad, the mainstream media would be all over it, but now its just on the Internet. Using online videos and viral marketing you can attack your opponent basically without consequence and fear of retaliation in-kind.