Online Comment Boards' Political Moment

Since Carl Paladino vaulted from a wealthy real estate developer in Buffalo to the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York one month ago, the endless stream of his missteps has been nothing short of befuddling. He has a vindictive, irascible personality. He bullies his way forward. He doesn't seem to have much going for him except for his frank opinions. And he captured the thick strand of national voter discontent so well that he zoomed past the state party's preferred candidate, Rick Lazio, a former congressman, to crush him in the primary.

Paladino's politics resemble the cacophony of the online comment boards at the bottom of news stories. There are the cute word games with opponents' names, such as "Status Cuomo" for his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, which Paladino's campaign manager coined. (This is actually mildly funny.) There are the promises of physical violence and name-calling, such as promising "to take a bat" to Albany and describing Sheldon Silver, New York's Assembly Speaker and a devout Jew, as the anti-Christ. There are the homophobic comments and e-mails forwarding racist jokes. And there's the hypocrisy of railing against insiderism and government spending while using his campaign donations to curry favor for project approvals, using state subsidies to help finance development, and using his campaign account to pay companies directly connected to him. (None of this is remotely funny, particularly the homophobic comments, considering the past month's wave of antigay crimes in metro New York.)

Comment boards, which never do anything more than insult, love to vent, kick and scream, as does Paladino, but rarely offer anything productive beyond that. There are no ideas, no alternatives and no solutions. Paladino rarely talks about anything substantive on the campaign trail, and when he does, he often can't help but scream mean things over it, so that's all the press writes about. He's little more than a cranky, bitter man, like so many of the people who comment on articles, but somehow he's riding a political wave.

On his political journey, Paladino has tapped into the same vein of unhappiness as the Tea Party has nationally, though he isn't quite a Tea Party darling in the way Rand Paul or Christine O'Donnell are. Also, some people who pledge allegiance to the Tea Party have articulated ideas about the nonexistent, fiscally conservative role they believe all government should have, unlike Paladino, who doesn't seem to have ideas. But the Tea Party is similar to online comment boards' writers because both have a fundamental desire to blow up the whole system and watch where the shards fall -- without seriously thinking about what that means and why those shards, when glued together, might serve some valid purposes.

Now that the Tea Party and online comment boards are having their political moment, it will be interesting to see if the voting public will be comfortable, six or 24 months down the road, with the contempt and incivility it's chosen to breed.