Daily Digest: Obama, Clinton, and the Saga of the Smear

The Web on the Candidates

• Crashing the gates? More like walking through the door. Less than a month after he announced he was writing for Newsweek, Markos Moulitsas has announced he’s writing for the ultimate inside-the-Beltway pub, The Hill. Will The Hill, like Newsweek, try to balance Kos out with a Rove-like figure? Not sure, but in any case I’ll repeat my standing offer to Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann: reverse-crash the gates and come on over to techPresident!

• Get me one of these: blogger “Nick Mockiavelli,” who writes the hilarious Voters Write! blog, announces a new product called On Demand Positions, “a micro-processor installed in the brain that allows them to genuinely support popular positions on a person-by-person basis depending on that individual’s intermost wants, desires, and needs.” Now who’s gonna invent an On Demand Positions DVR so we can record the output of this fine product? Also, check out his scoop that proves that, regardless of presidential ambitions, Barack Obama was a more popular student than Hillary Clinton in kindergarten. “Let’s be fair. I always shared my cupcakes and orange slices with others,” Obama “said” in a statement.

• Score another one: Why Tuesday’s Jacob Soboroff was at the MTV/MySpace dialogue with John McCain Monday night, and he got him to participate in WT’s Candidate Challenge. While McCain didn’t give many straight answers about his support for election reform, it’s fun to watch the WT team, including two cameramen, hound him as he heads back to his bus.

The Candidates on the Web

• Nasty smear emails alleging that Barack Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate are continuing to spread. The Politico’s Ben Smith got his hands on one, and found that while Hillary Clinton staffers received it, they didn’t apparently didn’t tell the campaign about it, and it appears that the email was sent by a member of Clinton’s Iowa Women’s Leadership Council. Meanwhile Clinton Internet Director Peter Daou wrote on DailyKos that the campaign has asked a “volunteer county coordinator” to step down. This stuff is ugly.

• Mitt Romney used UStream.tv to livestream his big “JFK” speech about his Mormonism today. It’s a hallmark moment for the campaign, which is rapidly losing ground to Mike Huckabee. Will the speech, like Kennedy’s, signal a rebirth for Romney?

• Beltway Blogroll’s Danny Glover has a good post about new Huckabee research director Joe Carter, who blogs at Evangelical Outpost. Carter’s been using the blog — which is not an official part of the Huckabee campaign — to rebut arguments against Huckabee, and now he’s reaching out to other conservative bloggers like the National Review’s Jim Geraghty. To be sure, Carter has an interesting take on the title “research director,” but his work is perhaps another reason why some believe Huckabee is running the best web campaign.

• Reading through an interview with former White House press secretary Dan Bartlett, Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz made an interesting (or disconcerting, or funny, or scary; we can’t decide) discovery about the White House’s opinion of right-wing blogs. In a nutshell, “They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them.” Conservatives, say it ain’t so!

In Case You Missed It…

In the second post in his “Who Will Be America’s First techPresident?” series, Micah Sifry grades the Republicans on their (lack of) tech policies. Their disappointing cumulative score: somewhere around a C+/D-.

Tomorrow is National Caucus Day! The project is a very cool exercise in democracy that is pushing to get all American citizens — not just those lucky enough to live in Iowa or New Hampshire — involved in the process of selecting our next president.