By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 25, 2007; D01

On his MySpace page, Joe, 64, says he's a Scorpio from Wilmington, Del., and that he went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School. His profile indicates that he's looking for "friends" on MySpace. At the moment, he has 1,199 of them on his page, including "Maya," "Honey" and "Parts Boy."

Bill, 59, from Santa Fe, N.M., says on his MySpace page that he's 6 feet 2, "Latino/Hispanic" and "straight. " He also says he's on the site for "networking [and] friends." And he's a Scorpio, too!

Oh, and one more thing: Both Joe and Bill seem very interested in becoming the next president of the United States. In fact, Joe (a.k.a. Sen. Joe Biden, Democrat from Delaware) and Bill (a.k.a. Bill Richardson, New Mexico's Democratic governor) wouldn't mind if you supported them while you check them out on MySpace.

Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are among the latest media organizing tools of the political set. Almost all the candidates who've announced they're running for president -- and even a few who haven't officially, like Richardson -- have posted profiles of themselves on the sites. With millions of young people passing through every day, a Facebook or MySpace page is a cheapo way to try for new donors, volunteers and potential votes.

Except that MySpace and Facebook -- which are essentially vast electronic meet markets -- require, well, a slightly different kind of come-on than a traditional campaign pitch.

So, instead of ponderous policy positions, the candidates' pages often feature trivial personal details (Zodiac signs and favorite books). Even worse, they can seem just a little creepy, as if the people running for president are trolling not just for supporters but for online hook-ups.

Until recently, for example, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate, told visitors to his MySpace page that his body type is "6'0"/Athletic" before dropping the subject altogether last week. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) noted that his was "Slim/Slender," until thinking better of it, too, and dropping the reference from his page in the past week.

Obama also reports that his sexual orientation is "straight," that his ethnicity is "Black/African descent" and that his religion is "Protestant." This is a bit of a self-adjustment, too. Until last week, Obama had described his ethnicity simply as "Other" and his religion as "Christian-other."

John Edwards drops the news that he's a Gemini and that his favorite movie is "The Shawshank Redemption." As for music, he'll take Bruce Springsteen ("The River") and Mary Chapin Carpenter ("This Shirt"). His Facebook profile offers the same haiku-like mini-biography that appears on his MySpace page: "Born in Seneca, South Carolina. My dad was a mill worker. I went to public schools. Met my life partner, Elizabeth (isn't she great). Proud father of four children. As a lawyer, I stood up against the powerful. As a Senator, I stood up for you. Currently fighting poverty. Go Tar Heels!"

Although it's hard to imagine political figures of an earlier age doing something like this -- would Franklin Delano Roosevelt confess his love of the Andrews Sisters on his Facebook profile? -- it's not hard to understand why politicians of today would.

"This is the equivalent of a politician going into an ethnic neighborhood and eating the local food," says Michael Cornfield, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in electronic politics. "If you're going to be [on a social networking site], it would be a breach of decorum not to fill out the [profile] form and drop some personal details."

Besides, says Cornfield, "Americans have always loved trivia" about their would-be leaders.

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.