Have you been wondering why no Republicans have Second Life builds yet? While Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all have unofficial builds promoting them and their platforms, the only Republican to enter the SL fray has been Rudy Giuliani, though that was via an anti-Giuliani build called “Disco Rudy’s.”

Now, Ron Paul — he of the bad web site and the growing number of MySpace friends — has become the first Republican to get an unofficial space. It was built by an avatar named marcburmeister Bury, who founded the "Ron Paul for President" group in SL, on space donated by the Gimme Liberty Bar, a libertarian “bar” operated by Gimme Castro. It seems to be benefitting from the sizable libertarian contingent in SL, which makes sense considering the cyber-utopian nature of the place, and although Paul is a Republican he’s become a darling of libertarians for his opposition to the war in Iraq, stance on border security, and his isolationist attitudes. LailaLei Mathilde, who writes the Second Life-centered blog Second Choices, says that "the intent is to bring Paul Republicans to Paul Libertarians and vice versa."

The build itself is very, very bare. It’s basically a small room with five Ron Paul posters on the walls, a podium you can use to give a speech, a kiosk that hands out notecards describing Paul’s stance on the issues, and a box that teleports you to the Gimme Liberty Bar.

And it was empty of avatars. Like most political SL builds, there was no one but me there when I visited. This is pretty consistently the case in SL; these spaces are perhaps best used for one-off events, at which large groups of supporters can gather. Otherwise, visiting them can be a lonely experience (as inhabiting SL in general can be).

If the point of builds like this is to organize supporters and get them to meet each other, they clearly aren’t meeting their goal. If they are intended as fundraising vehicles, which could be an interesting use, they haven’t tried much to make that connection. However, when reviewing SL builds, it always needs to be said that Second Life itself is still very much in a nascent stage, so it isn’t quite fair to judge these builds in the same way as we judge web sites.

Even so, there’s much more that can be done with these candidate support builds; they can offer more direct links to the candidates’ home pages (though in Paul’s case this doesn’t help much) and direct links to donation sites. If Paul and the other candidates can make good use of SL as a meetup-like space that is best used for group interactions, and can lead supporters to their websites, these builds may become useful yet. In the meantime, there are few compelling reasons to visit.