Daily Digest: Grassroots Fundraising vs. Public Financing

The Web on the Candidates

• National Public Radio is positioning itself as a pioneer in election-year citizen involvement, building out a new site called Get My Vote that encourages voters to post their “story” — “their core political beliefs and share personal stories about how those beliefs were formed” — via video, audio, or text. NPR producers will air some of the commentaries. It's a great looking site, and it smells of proto-blogger and web activist Andy Carvin, who’s also “senior product manager for online communities” at NPR. (Disclosure: I will soon be producing “political podcasts” for NPR as well).

• MyDD’s Jonathan Singer and Hotline’s Jennifer Skala both pick up on a statement from Barack Obama hinting that, contrary to previous statements, he won’t accept public financing because “We have created a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign they can get on the Internet and finance it…” Skala argues that since Obama isn’t taking money from PACs or Washington lobbyists (state lobbyists is another issue), “What would he have to prove by signing up for public financing?” Singer agrees, comparing Obama’s grassroots fundraising schema to McCain’s lobbyist connections. “This pledge [Obama’s rejection of PACs and federal lobbyists] is made all the more important by the fact that the McCain campaign is chock full of federal lobbyists, some of whom continued to lobby even from the so-called ‘Straight Talk Express.’” he writes. Obama’s fundraising model is increasingly a serious challenge to the current form of public financing.

• In this week’s Politico column, techPresident’s Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry consider Steven Clift’s question about e-government. Why is it that “the best-designed government websites are those collecting your taxes, while the worst sites are those giving you a say on how your taxes are spent?” Good examples of participatory online government can be found all over the world, from Estonia to New Zealand to the U.K. So why not in the U.S.?

The Candidates on the Web

• Newsweek’s Andrew Romano isn’t impressed with Hillary Clinton’s pseudo-conversational “NC Ask Me” campaign (neither were we). Comparing it to Barack Obama’s more-participatory “3-on-3 Basketball Challenge for Change,” he finds yet more evidence of a generation gap. The basketball challenge requires high school students to collect voter-registration forms from their peers in order to have the chance to shoot hoops with Obama. Romano interprets this focus on networking as a difference between Clinton’s boomer-esque top-down politicking and Obama’s more contemporary awareness of social networking trends. “So while the former First Lady awkwardly attempts to appeal to the latest generation of voters, Obama actually drives them to the polls. More than age, packaging or rhetoric, that has made all the difference.”

• Check out this cool video of Barack Obama discussing the impact of social media on his campaign, shot by Drue Kataoka of ValleyZen. Obama talks about how his campaign was able to win states like Idaho thanks to organizing using online tools. An aside: We know that this was shot by someone behind a site called ValleyZen, but what’s with the pan flute gold flute?

• We’ve noted before that, due to archaic House rules, Members of Congress are prohibited from posting videos to YouTube (the use of YouTube is seen as de facto advertising for it, and restrictions also rule out posting on a site with advertising). But today Roll Call reports that a special commission is working to create an advertising-free YouTube channel that would get around the current rules. The other option is to update the existing restrictions on posting content to outside websites. Imagine that! (Alas, the Roll Call article sits behind a subscription-only firewall.)

• At the end of every Presidential administration and Congressional term, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) takes a snapshot of Presidential and Congressional websites. No longer. According to dotgovwatch, NARA is passing the task to the Internet Archive. Dotgovwach thinks the task should continue to be a federal one. “The last Executive Branch web harvest that NARA conducted preserved 75 million web pages, many which will be valuable records for historians in the coming decades. The Internet Archive may cease to exist in 10 years, but the archives will only grow more valuable with time,” they write. Hey NARA, disk space is cheap! (via Sunlight Foundation)

In Case You Missed It…

New documents have come to light, man: The Ned Lamont campaign has been cleared once again of hacking Joe Lieberman’s site in August 2006.

Alan Rosenblatt just watched the new McCain girls video, “Here Comes McCain Again” and he’s totally creeped out. Aside from the fact that they have butchered one of his favorite songs, the goth motif is really spooky. And the scene with McCain looking in through the window… call the cops! We got a peeping John.