The YouTube political pundit

The American race for president has been in full swing for over a year, and dozens of candidates fought hard to be where Barack Obama and John McCain are right now, as their respective party’s nominee.
Resulting from efforts to reach a younger audience, the YouTube generation has enjoyed many attempts at online “viral” videos from campaigns and their supporters. These videos have joined the infinite array of clips of candidate speeches, interviews, and debates which make up the online user-generated political discussion.
With any new medium covering politics naturally comes political pundits willing to opine.
Enter: James Kotecki.
A 22-year-old graduate of Georgetown University, Kotecki was the first to succeed in political punditry with the online video blog, or “vlog”. In true YouTube fashion, Kotecki began by posting videos from his college dorm room in early 2007. Under the name of Emergency Cheese, Kotecki posted regular rants about the various presidential candidates with a focus on the online videos their campaigns had begun disseminating.
“I was basically a YouTube junkie, and I had a webcam, so I thought ‘I can be better than a lot of the stuff on here - if a guy wearing a t-shirt pontificating about his day can get a thousand views, why not me?’,” said Kotecki.
He may have been right, because his Emergency Cheese videos drew tens of thousands of viewers, many of which appreciated the comedy of his “pencil puppets”. Kotecki would stick photos of the candidates onto pencils to use as props during his videos.
“They were initially just a cheap and easy way of adding a graphic component,” said Kotecki. “Later, they became somehow iconic to a lot of people who watched my videos in a way that I didn’t expect.”
18 months later, the Syracuse, New York native is the face of online political video blogging. He has interviewed several presidential candidates, including a conversation with Congressman Ron Paul in his dorm room while still a student at Georgetown.
“I asked all the Presidential candidates on YouTube to visit my dorm room for an interview,” said Kotecki. “One of those candidates, Congressman Ron Paul, was kind enough to say yes and set a date. I found out later that someone in his campaign already knew my videos and helped push my case.”
Kotecki currently writes, produces, and hosts KoteckiTV, a daily video series on Politico.com. For his efforts, he won the 2008 Golden Dot Award for Best Vlog and has garnered plenty of attention in the traditional media. The Economist called Kotecki “probably the world’s foremost expert on YouTube videos posted by Presidential candidates.” He has appeared on CNN, FOX News, NPR, CBS, and the BBC, and he has been profiled in Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo! News, and US News and World Report.
Now a self-described expert on online presidential campaign videos, the former Congressional Page has loved politics since the seventh grade.
“It combines the competition of sports with the drama of theater, and as a bonus, it’s incredibly important to everyone’s lives,” said Kotecki.
Kotecki has so far managed to avoid being labeled as slanted one way or the other, which is rare among political pundits. This suited the non-partisan political journalism organization The Politico, which picked up Kotecki in the summer of 2007 in an effort to stay cutting-edge.
“I got on their radar screen after they wrote a story about my work on YouTube,” said Kotecki. “They were looking to expand their video presence, and as an edgy, entrepreneurial company, I guess they thought I was a good fit with what they were trying to build.”
With the motive and the means to truly dive into the 2008 presidential race full-time, Kotecki contemplated what he had seen so far and what he expected would come before the November election.
When considering which online video was the best from the election season, he chimed in former Republican candidate and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s “Huck/Chuck Facts” video featuring Chuck Norris.
“It was a TV commercial, but also perfectly suited to the ironic Chuck Norris appreciation of the Internet, driven of course by the Chuck Norris facts being circulated on the Internet,” said Kotecki, who also noted the positive impact of a video made by some of Barack Obama’s celebrity supporters entitled “Yes We Can”.
For Kotecki, the worst videos are the ones that don’t understand the concept of online viral video. “So many [online] videos are just traditional television commercials, speeches, or interviews, when candidates could be taking a chance on riskier, more casual, and more specifically web-based content,” said Kotecki.
As for what to expect from Obama and McCain in the coming months, Kotecki believes that the onus is on John McCain to begin to use the internet more creatively.
“I do expect McCain’s campaign to make more of an effort to appear web savvy, partly to counter the impression that the candidate himself is not,” said Kotecki.
The future beyond the election is unsure for Kotecki, as he could potentially be out of a job. Don’t expect to see him reporting for CNN, though.
“No,” he said when asked whether he wants to become a serious journalist. “I like making fun of people too much.”