www.roanoke.com

The unblinking stare of Paul Logan's mini-HD camcorder follows Creigh Deeds to virtually all his public events. And last weekend's campaign stop in Roanoke was no exception. Arriving well before the candidate, Logan set up his camera on a tripod, stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and waited.

When Deeds finally climbed out of his SUV, Logan -- a recent graduate from Tulane University -- went into action. As the Democratic candidate for governor made his way through the crowd, Logan followed a few steps behind, filming every exchange between Deeds and supporters.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, walked up to Logan, threw an arm over his shoulder, and whispered something in his ear. The GOP operative grinned.

A few minutes later, Deeds is introduced as the next governor of Virginia and the crowd starts cheering. Logan, expressionless, keeps his eyes on his camera's tiny screen.

At a similar rally in Charlottesville, Mike Mollen arrived a little late wearing a sports coat and a pair of khaki pants that looked rumpled next to the crisp suits of Bob McDonnell's campaign aides. For the next hour, he filmed McDonnell as he delivered his stump lines.

Stacey Johnson, McDonnell's traveling press secretary, offered an unsolicited opinion of the unassuming young man. "We love Mike," she said.

Logan and Mollen are professional trackers. Despite their apparently friendly relationship with the campaigns they follow, they're the enemies at these rallies. They work for the Republican and Democratic parties of Virginia, respectively, attending opposition events across the state in search of an exploitable gaffe.

As trackers, they collect and edit footage of the opponent, beaming it back to the party headquarters from the nearest coffee shop with free WiFi. Within hours, footage of a damning slip-up can be on YouTube. The trackers describe their work as mundane; they know their opposition candidate's campaign speeches better than the campaign aides do.

"At this point I could probably tell some of Creigh's stories as well as he can," said Logan, who lives in Arlington and last worked on John McCain's presidential campaign.

Tracking has been around in one form or another for a long time, well before George Allen infamously pointed out his tracker at a campaign event and repeatedly referred to him as "macaca." Bill Connelly, a professor of political science at Washington and Lee University, said the practice of sending campaign operatives to opposition rallies dates back to at least the 19th century. But what has changed is the technology for capturing and distributing the gathered materials.

Digital video and social media make it possible -- even mandatory -- that campaigns eavesdrop full time on each other. It's so open, trackers are now like part of the opposing camp's family, a cynical inside joke. But the joke is on the voters, who can be sure that the candidates will keep their manufactured image air tight, all the time. And if they slip up? The gaffe, the goofy face -- these become the highest form of political discourse. And it all bypasses the old political reporters who might actually know what's important.

This wasn't how opposition tracking was used before now.

As recently as 2005, Mike Reynolds, now McDonnell's deputy campaign director and then tracker for Jerry Kilgore's gubernatorial campaign, gathered footage that was all kept in house and used to prepare for debates and to evaluate opponents' strategies.

After Allen's incident in 2006, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a "campaign Internet guide" that recommends campaigns film their opposition at all public events. The document, exposed by Politico in 2007, also suggests a new communication strategy that bypasses the mainstream media by sending releases first to "friendly" bloggers who will generate buzz surrounding a topic, which mainstream publications will then report on.

That approach seems to have worked for both Deeds and McDonnell in the current race. Footage of McDonnell supporter and BET founder Sheila Johnson mocking Deeds' stutter has garnered nearly 98,000 views on YouTube since it was posted by a Virginia blogger. The story was eventually picked up by mainstream news outlets, but only after it made the rounds on various blogs.

Logan's recording of Deeds' blundering through a series of questions about transportation funding after the Fairfax Chamber of Commerce debate in September attracted nearly 58,000 views since it was posted on the Republican Party of Virginia's Web site.

A reporter might use a clip of the exchange, said Tom Murtaugh, the communications director for the Republican Party of Virginia. He thought it was worth showing the footage in its entirety. So the party took things into its own hands to get the video out there. For a few weeks after the debate, it was virtually impossible to look at any Virginia newspaper's Web site without seeing an ad with a picture of Deeds looking confused that linked to the video.

Logan said it's a good feeling when footage he's shot catches on. He added that when he and Mollen run into each other at joint events, they're likely to compare the number of viewers their respective videos have attracted.

"I think it's important to be here to keep people honest," Logan said.

At the same time, the negative tenor of political campaigns, fueled in part by footage from trackers, has some people fed up. If voters only listened to the negative television commercials, they wouldn't vote for anyone, as Sen. Warner complained while campaigning with Deeds in Roanoke.

In the face of so much negativity, it's easy to imagine the quality of political discourse spiraling downward with every election cycle. The only bit of original self-expression that gets played up is what makes a candidate look bad and, as a result, the extent of the dialogue on the campaign trail has been whittled down to a few often repeated lines.

To Deeds, having the omnipresent Logan around isn't something he's going to complain about -- at least not openly.

"I'm running for governor, I don't have anything to hide," Deeds said.

But that doesn't mean the candidate won't occasionally try to escape the constant scrutiny of a tracker.

Five minutes later, as the crowd thinned out, Deeds talked to a lone supporter. When Logan approached the two with his video camera, the candidate took his conversation somewhere private, to try for at least a minute to be real, away from Logan's electronic eyes and ears.