All the fizz aside, new media have the capacity to create distinctions with a difference.

What’s really interesting about this particular moment in our nation’s electoral life is that neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidates generating much of the interest and enthusiasm have declared formally that they are running. Both, in fact, have made themselves forces to be reckoned with by standing outside the formalised political process and communicating with voters through new and alternative media.

We’re speaking, of course, of former Senator Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican, and Oscar darling — incidentally, ex-vice president of the United States — Al Gore, a Democrat. Both have held themselves apart from the predictable give-and-take of national primary politics and yet both remain every bit a force in this season’s campaign.

And both have done it by holding themselves apart from conventional campaign and journalistic expectations and speaking to potential voters through new and unconventional media channels.

Gore, for example, has created a virtual textbook example of a multimedia candidacy. His jeremiads on global warming began as a lecture hall slide show, became an Oscar-winning documentary and an intricate series of mutually supportive internet links and is mutating into a Globe-spanning series of rock concerts that will be watched by billions. Not bad.

Thompson’s example is, if anything, even more intriguing.

Gore has availed himself of media by ways that are, in the context of presidential politics, untrodden, if well laid out. Thompson is blazing entirely new trails. For one thing, he generally avoids conventional political interviews, speaking mainly to commentators and analysts who distribute their work online to ideologically sympathetic audiences. That’s interesting, but self-limiting. His foray into what might be called new media image advertising is something else entirely.

... contd.