My Fellow Americans: Pls Post a Comment!

Looking for friends, and a few votes: On his MySpace page, presidential hopeful Joseph Biden shares that he's a Scorpio from Wilmington, Del. (Myspace.com)

But does revealing one's "body type" actually convince users of the sites that Candidate X shares their interests and issues? Or is it something like a middle-aged guy putting a baseball cap on backward -- a lame attempt to prove to young people that he's happening and with it?

Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, for one, isn't likely to win friends on MySpace with any hipster revelations. Tancredo's personal profile reveals, among other things, that he likes "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy!" and the History Channel. The background image on his profile page is a sharp picture of the White House, which has the virtue of being more on-message than his previous background: dozens of photos of Tancredo posing with someone wearing a Clifford the Big Red Dog outfit.

On the other hand, Tancredo does mention that he was once a teenage bagger at a Denver area Safeway store. He describes it as having been his "worst job ever."

The new social networking media require a delicate balancing act, says Zach Exley, who directed online organizing for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004. While they enable campaigns to reach and interact with millions of young people, Exley says, "as a candidate and as an older person, you've got to find a dignified and genuine way of presenting yourself. . . . If they're passing the job off to their interns, which they probably are, that could be a problem."

Well, while no campaign claims the actual candidates are personally tending to their Facebook pages every night, they do insist that the job is taken seriously. By someone.

"We have multiple, full-time, paid staffers worrying about this now," says Eric Carbone, director of Internet operations for Biden's campaign. "It's come a long way since 2004." Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the photo-sharing site Flickr, he says, "are part of a modern campaign now."

Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki says, "We have a supporter who controls and updates" the senator's Facebook and MySpace pages.

A supporter?

"Yes," says Psaki. "We're a grass-roots campaign."

A bigger risk than seeming unhip or inauthentic is what a "friend" might post on a candidate's page, says Michael Turk, the former electronic campaign director of the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. If the campaigns aren't vigilant, Turk says, they could open themselves to negative or inflammatory postings, not to mention raunchy material, from outsiders. Or even supporters: A recent incident in which two bloggers hired by Edwards's campaign resigned after making controversial comments on their own blogs should have been a wake-up call, he says.

Before it disappeared last week, a "friend" named Suzi Q had posted a somewhat revealing picture of a leggy young woman in glasses on Biden's MySpace page. By clicking to Suzi Q's own profile page, one could learn that Suzi was a "Transsexual Playmate Formerly from Toronto Canada Retired to Florida in 2001." Suzi at one point listed her occupation as "escort" but later changed this to "adult entertainer," reporting her income as "$75,000 to $100,000."

With friends like these, candidates may not need many opponents.

Says Turk: "Associating with transsexual [escorts] could very quickly become an issue, certainly in the Republican primary. The problem is, [a candidate] doesn't have plausible deniability" to say he wasn't aware of a posting, because the keeper of a MySpace or Facebook page controls who gets to be a "friend." "Guilt by association is still a very powerful concept," Turk says.

That concept might also apply to the groups that the candidate himself joins on the networking sites. These groups often have provocative names, and a voter could get the wrong idea. Obama -- who has been the most effective at exploiting the power of the social networking sites so far -- has listed himself as a member of such curiously named groups as "Every Other Tuesday," "Jon Stewart for President," "Gruven NightLife" and "The Bone Crew."

Hip perhaps, but unclear how much that'll help in Iowa.