Don’t Bother Bookmarking This: DevalPatrick.tv

Of all the most unnewsworthy things to come about during this election year, Deval Patrick’s launching of “Deval Patrick TV” has to be the most useless and unworthy of them all, but the Boston Globe sure thinks it is something to write about.

His rivals are on the public airwaves, so Deval Patrick is striking back on his own online TV channel.

The Democratic gubernatorial candidate announced Tuesday he had created “Deval Patrick TV,” viewable online at http://www.DevalPatrick.tv. The Web site features the video he first played at the Democratic State Convention in June, as well as his videotaped thoughts on an array of campaign topics.

Patrick, a corporate lawyer and former Clinton administration official, has yet to begin advertising on Massachusetts broadcast stations, even as his two primary opponents, Attorney General Tom Reilly and businessman Chris Gabrieli, have launched multimillion-dollar buys.

Patrick aides said he will begin his own TV advertising Friday, when he airs a biographical spot that will start a five-week, $2.5-million ad buy that will continue to the Sept. 19 primary.

With his own TV site on the Internet, Patrick is expanding campaign usage of the Web, something whose potential truly emerged with Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic presidential campaign. Patrick aides also announced Tuesday that they had already raised $1 million online, including $280,000 during the past two weeks.

“Filled with high quality videos of speeches, messages from Deval and more, DevalPatrick.tv goes beyond the 30-second sound byte and lets you choose what you want to watch,” said a campaign statement.

I’ll tell you right now, there is nothing new about the content on DevalPatrick.tv. Nothing–at least, nothing to make note of. It is pretty clear that DevalPatrick.tv is nothing more than his typical media section from his website (which acts as a portal to DevalPatrick.tv when you click on “video gallery”). It contains videos of his advertisements, speeches, messages, all the junk that he had on www.devalpatrick.com, sans the .tv at the end of it.

In other words, it’s basically more of the same thing.

Deval Patrick’s campaign does a minor shift to their web page and it makes the news? Please. Every candidate has video clips of their commercials and speeches and other miscellaneous messages in one form or another, as did Deval Patrick. Does he think that we’ll visit this site because it has a spiffy .tv at the end of it? That’s not going to make up for not having begun TV advertising up to this point.

Putting campaign commercials on your website is a fine idea, but it doesn’t take the place of television advertising… not yet anyways.

Patrick’s campaign does deserve credit for running a decent internet campaign. He probably has the best campaign website of any candidate, but campaigns are not fought or won on the internet. At this point in time, the internet is the battleground of the activists, not the undecideds. While Deval Patrick’s supporters in the blogosphere may be salivating over this, the rest of us are yawning…

So yawn it up folks. Take a journey to DevalPatrick.tv, or you can wait until Friday when 30 seconds of a message approved by Deval Patrick is sandwiched into your favorite television programs.

Aaron Margolis is a life long resident of the Bay State, and works at an architectural firm north of Boston. Aaron has a Master of Architecture Degree from Boston Architectural College and is currently in the process of becoming of a Registered Architect.