Daily Digest: If Chris Dodd Scores a Victory, Does Anyone Hear It?

The Web on the Candidates

• Force of nature and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald describes the “anatomy and significance” of the pulling of the FISA bill from the Senate floor yesterday. One section of the bill, which is actually a renewal of the existing FISA bill, would grant telecom companies retroactive immunity for participating in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Chris Dodd has made the issue one of the focus points of his campaign, and placed a hold on the bill and threatened to filibuster if he had to. Greenwald describes the support Dodd received from bloggers and activists, which eventually pushed Harry Reid to temporarily pull the bill. Big media has virtually ignored the news — indeed, it’s much more important to decide whether a cross or a bookcase is floating behind Mike Huckabee’s head — so check out Greenwald’s heroic reporting instead.

• TechPresident contributor Colin Delany was similarly impressed, not only by Dodd’s effort but by that of the online activists that rallied behind him. “I’ve been asked more than once by political veterans skeptical of the role of blogs and other forms of online citizen activism to point a specific instance in which the Internet made a real difference in a political issue. This sounds like one of them.” Check out Dodd’s video comments about the victory and the value of including activists in the process — he’s pumped. His campaign is rightly using it to convince voters of his leadership.

• BlogHer’s Lisa Stone has a great piece up on the Huffington Post in which she details the ways in which presidential campaigns have failed to truly reach out to women bloggers. She calls BlogHer “the Web’s leading guide to 7.6 million women who read and write blogs,” yet despite consistent outreach from BlogHer editors coming from the left and right (including techPresident’s Morra Aarons), no presidential candidates have agreed to talk with them, and only two have offered their wives in their stead. Yet Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney have produced old-school marketing sites meant to appeal to women. BlogHer is polling folks to help understand this reluctance to engage with women voters. It is truly astounding, considering the number of voters involved. So take the the poll and send a message to the candidates.

• I always flinch when I hear someone (usually a middle-aged pundit) say that young people don’t vote. But 18-to-19-year-olds have been voting in greater numbers in each election since 2000, and activists groups are working hard to capitalize on the turnout. One such project, reports the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas, is a partnership between Rock the Vote and AT&T to help millenials “get election news and voter registration updates through texts.” It’s about time! Marketers have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to text, and activists and campaigns are still catching up.

• A new site helping voters compare the candidates, called 2008 Election ProCon.org, keeps it nice and simple. It categorizes each candidate’s position as Pro, Con, Not Clearly Pro or Con, or None Found, and offers a bunch of resources. Folks always seem to be looking for that one site that will pull all candidate information and resources together, so here’s another. But my money is on Political Base, still the best way to discover the candidates’ positions and follow their fundraising trails.

The Candidates on the Web

• Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are engaged in a Microsofot vs. Apple-style switcher’s war. Dueling videos present former supporters who are now shilling for the other side. The Politico’s Ben Smith has a rundown, along with an anti-John Edwards video that actually does a good job of mimicking the sharpness and wit of his own campaign videos.

In Case You Missed It…

Obama uses the web for thousands of offline events: well done. But candidate websites still haven’t made the jump to serving undecided voters, writes Zephyr Teachout.

On any given day, Micah Sifry is reading—or trying to finish—about four or five books. Yesterday he took a break from his book piles to offer some capsule reviews of several books he read this year that cover the emerging world of technology and politics.