In USA, the election of the Republican Scott Brown to the Senate is a small political bombshell. He has been elected on the seat of Ted Kennedy, an emblematic personnality of the American liberals and he has demonstrated that Republicans know now how to use Internet effectively.
If Micah Sifry, founder of TechPresident, wrote that "the Internet has suggested again and again that it loves an insurgent candidate (Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Barack Obama...)", he seems to regret that "the Internet's ability to alter the dynamics of US politics--given the existing hard-wiring of the rest of the political process--seems to be far better tuned for "stop this" than "do this."
Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, is thinking that the campaigning online is changing. "The Internet was for the young, the hip, the multicultural, the liberal. Let the G.O.P. be the party of Fox News. The Democrats would be the party of Google, YouTube and Facebook. But it’s been crumbling ever since Obama took office. Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State’s establishment." He also thinks that "the attempts to turn the campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped".
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