In many ways, the campaign was a microcosm of the most
important cultural changes of the past decade. One major
development has been the technology-driven emergence of
alternative media that have transformed American society,
including the electoral process. The most popular on-line
newspapers, such as the Huffington Post, have as much clout as
venerable opinion-shapers such as the New York Timesand the
Wall Street Journal. Cable television has edged out network TV
as the go-to source for information, even though, or perhaps
because, many cable TV personalities wear their politics on
their sleeves. The pace of campaigning (like the pace of every-
thing else) has also sped up to the point where the lag time
between a candidate’s remark and the appearance of a slick tel-
evision ad countering it is a matter of hours. Thanks to
Google, most of what the candidates have said in the past can
be accessed in a nanosecond. In a sense, there is no past in the
blogosphere. Anything that happens in front of a camera (and
almost every cell phone is a camera) can be stored forever and
retrieved and disseminated in an instant. As a result, what the
candidates are saying on the campaign trail is paralleled by an-
other campaign going on in the blogosphere. In this Internet
campaign, truth and lies are mixed in unpredictable ways and
may be hard to tell apart; Stephen Colbert’s truthinessis the
perfect coinage for this new reality. In contrast to the public
campaign, the candidates don’t necessarily control this shadow
campaign, although they can influence it. And whether it is
fact-based or steeped in bias or worse, this shadow campaign
shapes attitudes and has a real though unpredictable affect on
the outcome of the election.
Given the seriousness and complexity of the problems roil-
ing the nation, it is no surprise that voters followed the 2008Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition0465014088_02.qxd:0738208175_02.qxd 1/9/09 1:33 PM Page 211