Salon Person of the Year: S.R. Sidarth

The campaign did not put the video on YouTube, the file-sharing service, until the Post had taken the bait, publishing a short story online. It was a relatively slow news week, in the dead heat of August vacation season, and the political press, backed by hundreds of bloggers, went wild. The macaca frenzy was born. More stories followed, about Allen's apparently uneasy relationship with his Jewish heritage, then about Allen's alleged pattern of racist behavior. Though Allen's denials were consistent, he never regained his balance or his standing in the polls.

A nation of political partisans took notice. Everywhere there were imitators. In Colorado, activists for the liberal group Progress Now taunted Republican Rep. Marilyn Musgrave as she walked down the street, hoping she would embarrass herself. In Montana, in another cliffhanger race won by a Democrat, opponents of incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns hounded him with a camcorder as he traveled across the state making gaffe after gaffe. And in Virginia, an abrasive blogger named Mike Stark shouted questions at Allen until he was tackled by Allen's staff.

Now with the onset of the 2008 campaign, the macaca myth is set to grow ever larger. Allen's loss, after all, set the nation on a new course. It changed control of the Senate and suggested that Virginia, with 13 electoral votes, may have changed from red to purple. But the real lessons remain to be sorted out. Clearly, closely contested political campaigns will now take place in a sort of YouTube panopticon. Michael Moore-aping saboteurs will proliferate. But the upside is also considerable. Voters will have more opportunity than ever before to stand in Sidarth's shoes and see their leaders in action, at their most candid, and perhaps their most honest.

Days after the election, Sidarth wrote an essay for the Washington Post analyzing his role as a key bystander in the 2006 election. He zeroed in on one important fact. The backlash against Allen had apparently reached into the southern Virginia county where the senator had uttered the word. Dickenson County was assumed by much of the national press to be a place that still embraced the old Confederate Virginia, a state where until 1997 the official song was a minstrel ballad called "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia." In that ditty, the narrator, a self-identified "darkey" labors "so hard for old massa."

"Nothing made me happier on election night than finding out the results from Dickenson County," Sidarth wrote. "Webb won there, in what I can only hope was a vote to deal the race card out of American politics once and for all."

Those are the hopes of an idealistic college student. While most of white downstate Virginia is solidly Republican, Dickenson County, with its history of unionized mining, tilts Democratic. Even John Kerry won Dickenson while losing the state.

But Sidarth is right that the macaca incident played a pivotal role in the election. It just may not be the role he imagined. Sidarth wants to believe it means the race card is losing its potency in the rural South. Pundits wonder about the long-term implications of homemade, unfiltered, viral webcasts on political campaigns. But the real message of macaca may have been the kid behind the camera.

Jim Webb eked out a statewide victory on the basis of massive margins in the booming suburbs of northern Virginia. Macaca and all the missteps that followed helped convince voters in these affluent, well-educated and increasingly diverse zip codes outside Washington that they had grown tired of George Allen. But the same voters may also have recognized Sidarth, born and raised in northern Virginia, a straight-A student at a state college and a member of the local Hindu temple, as their neighbor. Allen was just a California transplant with dip and cowboy boots who had glommed on to the ancient racial quirks of his adopted home. Sidarth was the kid next door. He, not Allen, was the real Virginian. He was proof that every hour his native commonwealth drifts further from the orbit of the GOP's solid South and toward a day when Allen's act will be a tacky antique. Allen was the past, Sidarth is the wired, diverse future -- of Virginia, the political process and the country.

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