Daily Digest: 10/25/07

The Web on the Candidates

• Dodd gets dugg. A simple new site called Thank You Chris Dodd, set up by bloggers at The Seminal to show support for Chris Dodd and his filibuster against the FISA renewal bill, has made it to the front page of Digg’s World & Business section, with 566 diggs as of this morning. It’s further proof of a continuing spike in online support of Dodd.

• Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald sees a stark contrast between Dodd’s leadership on FISA and the”complete passivity and invisibility” of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
  . Greenwald points out that it was only after they got wind that liberal blogs and MoveOn planned a campaign to pressure them did the two frontrunners comment on Dodd’s filibuster. But both statements were “couched in the sort of amorphous, equivocating hedging that is the currency of the principle-free, cynical-game-playing Beltway insider,” as Greenwald lovingly puts it.

• Writing at the Compete.com blog, Matt Pace shows off an interesting chart that uses website data to show where the candidates fall on the political spectrum. By charting the percentage of visitors to a candidate sites who also visited liberal and conservative blogs, Compete was able to create a ranking of the most and least liberal candidates. While the results won’t surprise you, the methodology might. The most liberal: Dennis Kucinich. The least: Fred Thompson.

• From the folks who brought us Obama Girl comes a new paean to a political figure, this one not so admiring. The new song is called “Perfected,” and it’s an ode to, you guessed it, Ann Coulter, sung by Leah Kauffman, the voice behind Obama Girl (but not the girl in the video). In the folk-pop piece Kauffman mockingly accepts Coulter’s suggestion that Jews need to be “perfected” and asks Coulter to lead her to the light. Another fun political video from BarelyPolitical that manages to have almost no actual political content.

• Two new studies from Off The Bus are injecting some much-needed citizen spirit into coverage of the race. In one, Nancy Watzman discovers that rather than encouraging the participation of thousands of small donors, the Republican frontrunners went straight to the richest, whitest zip codes in the country to get cash in the closing days of Q3. In the other, techPresident’s Zephyr Teachout and co-writer Kelly Nuxoll look at the gender disparities in the campaigns. The result: most campaigns are dominated by men, with Rudy Giuliani the worst offender. Off The Bus has been ramping up its coverage of late, and hopefully these two fantastic pieces of volunteer journalism are hints of what’s to come.

• A new youth engagement initiative called Generation Engage, or GenGage (get it? Gen-Gage!) has announced an iChat video conversation with the candidates focusing on rural internet access and the digital divide. It will take place this Saturday, and so far Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards are scheduled to attend. None of the GOP frontrunners, who apparently are unwilling to involve themselves with anything that smacks of online voter participation, are slated to attend.

• In his second video blog post, the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas sits down with students at George Washington University and asks if they're using online tools to engage with the 2008 election. Most do, and they agree that the web is essential to getting out the young vote, and these young voters say that they're generation is brimming with political activism.

In Case You Missed It…

10Questions co-creator David Colarusso weighs in on the state of our new online presidential forum, responding to critiques and offering up some clues about where we’re going next.

In his daily 10Questions update, Micah Sifry reports that in the last 24 hours, users added ten videos to the mix, bringing the total to 66. The total number of votes hit 21,500, from 5,300 users. More here.

Zephyr Teachout gives us a taste of her new report on gender and influence on political campaigns.

Bill Richardson fired the latest round the the plain-text email wars, this time including an email thread from his staffers.