GOP Online Video Duel -- Kephart Peddles Nuclear Fear

PP turns our attention to GOP Senate candidate Sam Kephart's new online whizbangery. Kephart has posted a fun interactive video and slideshow. I say kudos -- it beats the pants off the noisy video clip Joel Dykstra had jumping out at me from his campaign home page before I could hit the mute button. (I check this morning and find a less in-my-face rotating series of slide links -- thank you!).

Kephart's slideshow is less polished than Dykstra's produced videos. Dykstra hit the studio and made a series of short videos against a clean white backdrop. Kephart has posted video straight from a public appearance next to a potted plant. The video may not look as sharp, but it does show Kephart in a slightly more natural setting. He's talking to a real audience. He pauses to interact and listen to audience comments. The speech runs about 35 minutes, but Kephart has bookmarked it and provided an outline, so viewers can click straight to topics of interest...

...like the "Day of Islam," the purported plot by bin Laden and friends to nuke seven American cities on one day. Maybe Kephart was watching too much Jericho, but he says he knows "through my security connections" that "two of those nuclear devices were purchased by the Russians and are already in this county." Kephart acknowledges that al-Qaeda probably won't waste a nuclear bomb on the Corn Palace (it does look a bit like a mosque -- maybe that'll keep us safe), but he worries (and wants us to worry enough to vote for him) that South Dakota is woefully unprepared for a "lifeboat situation" in which hordes of refugees from nuked metropolises would finally realize that South Dakota is a great place to raise a family. (Hmm... maybe the LAIC should include that line in its Forward Madison marketing materials: "Madison: Low Risk of Nuclear Attack!")

But let's not leave without a gem from Dykstra. His video about why the 2008 election is so important doesn't try to worry us with the prospect of fighting off mutants from Chicago (o.k., that's my line, not Kephart's). But it does ratchet up the rhetoric, treating this election as a critical -- critical! -- juncture in American history where we face a choice between unprecendented prosperity and security or "disastrous policies and erosion of our heritage that will result in a country we might not recognize if we were able to come back here in fifty or a hundred years."

Dykstra doesn't speak of internal migration caused by terrorist attacks, but he does address immigration. He's not going for the anti-Gonyo immigrant vote. Dykstra speaks of "the need to develop a sensible 21st-century solution for a system of legal immigration to provide the labor source our country needs to support the economic growth our entrepreneurs and innovators are creating." Rather awkward sentence -- clearly the product of someone writing a speech rather than talking to an audience... but at least an acknolwedgment that we rely on foreign labor for our economic well-being.

Still no sign of a video website from darkhorse candidate Charles Gonyo. Running for Senate is just like door prizes, Chuck -- must be present to win!