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Daily Digest: The Letter Wars of 2008

BY Joshua Levy | Friday, March 28 2008

The Web on the Candidates

  • Super delegates are the hanging chads of 2008: First, Hillary Clinton donors sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nancy Pelosi, asking her to retract comments that Democratic superdelegates should support whichever candidate gets the most pledged delegates. Now MoveOn.org has released a petition of their own in support of Pelosi and criticizing the Clinton donors for “trying to use their high-roller status to strong arm the Democratic leaders.” As MoveOn sees it, “the people, not the superdelegates, should decide the Presidential nomination.” When will it stop? Democratic referee Howard Dean says July 1.

  • Think politics is just a game? For Political Machine, it’s exactly that. To be honest, we can’t quite grok how this game works, and the site’s hilariously tautological explanation isn’t much help: “The Political Machine is a strategy game that takes the real world mechanics of political campaigning and uses it to create an award-winning strategy game.”

  • Sometimes I just love how the web keeps a conversation going. We already linked to a great post from Ranjit Mathoda on Barack Obama and the coming “digital presidency.” That post is fodder for an ongoing discussion on Slashdot, in which a discussion rages about Rev. Wright, how far to the left and right the candidates are, and the merits of Barack Obama’s techno-awareness.

The Candidates on the Web

  • When news hit this week that Mike Gravel had left the Democratic Party, a collective “who?” could be heard across the land. Thankfully, the St. Petersburg Time’s Amy Hollyfield took the time to find out if there really is such a thing as a Gravel candidacy. He isn’t on the ballot in most states, and is touring the Northeast — where most states have had their primaries — soon. But the clearest indication of a failed candidacy? “Apparently I’ve been relegated to a footnote at YouTube,” Gravel complains.

In Case You Missed It…

Alan Rosenblatt looks back at this year’s political videos and considers the rock star status of Hillary, Obama, McCain, and Gravel, linking them to renewed voter energy and changing political landscape. Long live rock!

The race may have winnowed down to three candidates, but the videos keep a-flowin’. In this weeks roundup of our favorite videos, John McCain’s out with a new ad; a Robert Palmer tune gets an update; we meet John Barnes, a candidate who promises to stick to the issues; and those McCain girls continue to entertain.

News Briefs

RSS Feed yesterday >

"Power Politics in the Age of Google"

TechPresident's editorial director, Micah Sifry, will be speaking this afternoon on a panel at Harvard University called "Power Politics in the Age of Google," alongside Susan Crawford, Nicco Mele, Elaine Kamarck and Alexis Ohanian. The panel will be moderated by Harvard Shorenstein Center Director Alex Jones, and will be live-streamed here. GO

House Republicans Get a Jump on the Budget

Via Politico's Mike Allen, the House Republicans are out with a video — this one attributed to Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — getting the drop on President Barack Obama's next federal budget, expected Monday. GO

Mittbucks.com Lets Voters Compare Their Paychecks With Romney's

What would it take for Mitt Romney to be able to relate to the average American's daily economic life? He'd have to pay $1,208.09 for a gallon of gas, according to Mittbucks.com, a web site recently created by Adam Rosenscruggs and his wife Danielle in Washington, D.C. The eye-popping figure results from an annual income that I plugged in ... GO

What Twitter Won't Tell You About the Election

A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Tuesday offers the opportunity to get real about what the political conversation on Twitter and Facebook can — or can't — tell you about the progression of the 2012 political campaign. Pew has found that even among users of Twitter and Facebook, a paltry percentage of people use social networks to get news about politics: Only 24 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 25 percent of Facebook users said they "sometimes" got campaign news through that network, while a full 40 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 46 percent of other social media users reported "never" getting campaign news through either Twitter or Facebook. GO

Navigating New York's "Road Map for the Digital City," One Year In

In May 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a "Road Map for the Digital City," a plan to use technology to make city government more and participatory, and to leverage the city's tech sector for economic and civic gains.

New York City Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne will join our editorial director, Micah Sifry, on a conference call this Friday afternoon to discuss the progress on that road map so far. The call is free and open to anyone to join. You can sign up here.

GO

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Pete Hoekstra's Campaign Website's "Offensive" Source Code Changed After Outcry

As if "chop suey fonts" and obvious graphic allusions to the stereotype of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril weren't controversial enough, the group that created an incendiary microsite for former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's campaign has managed to further fan the flames with what it's calling a mistake in its code. GO

Fidel Castro Loves the Internet

“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet. Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. GO

Claire McCaskill Hires Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner As Digital Director

Missouri's senior Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill has hired Blue State Digital's Alex Kellner as its digital director. GO

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