Daily Digest: The Politics of Double-Speak and Video Follow-ups

The Web on the Candidates

• Stephen Colbert may not be on the South Carolina ballot for the Democrats, but don’t fear, the folks at user-generated advertising site GeniusRocket have included him in their GeniusRocket Primary. The winners of the primary — it’s actually a contest — receive awards for the best 30-second presidential ads, and they’ve included Colbert among the candidates you can support. It’ll be fun to see the entries for the contest — maybe Colbert can run his ads in South Carolina, you know, just for the fun of it.

• To promote a new special about the 2008 election, NPR affiliate WNYC set up a water cooler (and a video camera, of course) in New York’s Washington Square Park and asked people to indulge in some good old-fashioned water-cooler talk about the campaign. The result is an engaging video that shows how appealing a water cooler in the middle of a city park can be. Check out the video here, and look out for billiondollarpresident.org later this week.

• In the works for some time, the Debatepedia project has officially launched. As the name suggests, the site, produced by the International Debate Education Association, intends to become the “Wikipedia of debate and reasoning.” It’s a citizen-generated database of pro and con arguments and supporting evidence, divided into thematic sections that include the 2008 presidential election, which includes 48 articles about major issues (although they’re all in the “D” section, since the titles all start with “Debate:”; it’s confusing). Some of them, like abortion, are thoroughly filled out with pro and coon articles and supporting data, but others, like the section on military options in Iran, need editors. So, truth-seeking netizens of the 21st century, get to it!

The Candidates on the Web

• Immediately after last week’s Democratic debate, the John Edwards campaign produced a video accusing Hillary Clinton of engaging in “double-speak” for her statements about Iraq, social security, and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. The video, called “The Politics of Parsing,” has been a hit, amassing more than 230,000 views on YouTube. The big question, however, is whether it’s peoples’ passion for John Edwards dislike of Hillary Clinton that’s propelling the video.

• In any event, the Edwards campaign has issued a "correction" of that video, in which it claims that Clinton actually does answer a yes or no question: she unequivocally states that she takes money from lobbyists. As is customary for the campaign, the video -- which continues the perennial third-place Edwards' aggressive attacks on Clinton -- is directly connected to a fundraising drive.

In Case You Missed It…

Morra Aarons rounds up perspectives on Hillary Clinton from around the feminist blogosphere. She worries that, in the face of an electorate working out its collective discomfort with such a powerful woman, what so many pundits see as “surefootedness” is a calculated means not to alienate confused voters and a ravenous press.

Mike Huckabee addict Zephyr Teachout points out that, according to Hitwise, Huckabee is on a roll as his web traffic surpasses Barack Obama’s. But a new fundraising appeal Huckabee’s new fundraising appeal on his website feels a bit like the fisherman’s wife. Read more for an explanation of that one.

Zephyr also wants the candidates to actually mention current events on their websites. Her idea: fuse current political events and current campaign events. When something happens — a farm bill, marshall law, border skirmishes in Turkey — create one place to go to see how each of the Presidential candidates have responded. We can dream.

Last Thursday 10Questions.com had 1,300 unique visits, with about 6,000 page views. Even with that lower level of traffic, the number of votes on the site continues to grow at a healthy pace, with another 2,000 tallied yesterday. More here.

A new site from the Drum Major Institute, TheMiddleClass.org, bills itself as “Your toolkit for holding Congress accountable,” and its innovative scorecards and widgets make dry but important legislative info more accessible than ever.