Six years later, the campaign tracker sees a re-birth on YouTube

In 2006, George Allen uttered the word "macaca" on film and changed the course of YouTube Politics forever. From that moment, the political world learned two important lessons: 1) YouTube is a powerful medium for spreading political messages and 2) everything a candidate says can be recorded on camera by a campaign tracker, employed by the opposition.

In 2012, campaign trackers are no longer a novelty on the trail. Today's NPR "All Things Considered" story offers a deeper look at how this position has evolved into a campaign "must-have" and how they've changed how politicians operate.

But what about hiring a tracker to document your own campaign's every move? That's precisely what the Romney campaign is doing. Governor Romney's body man Garrett Jackson has been uploading behind-the-scenes footage of moments along the campaign trail to his personal YouTube account, offering a glimpse of Romney that the public doesn't see very often.

Garrett's most-popular video, uploaded three weeks ago, has received over half a million views and documents an April Fools prank on the Governor:



With viewership like this, the Romney campaign should seriously consider having Garrett upload to their official campaign channel instead. For comparison's sake, the most-viewed video in the last month on the official Romney channel has received only 91,000 views.