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Daily Digest: The Well-Oiled Campaign Machine

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, July 17 2008

The Web on the Candidates

  • New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and -- sooprise, sooprise -- Rep. Ron Paul came out on top in Slate's veep picker. Paulites are still coming out for their man in full force, swamping, reports Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland, the GOP's platform-crafting website. Should the fact that Paulies are consistently able to totally overwhelm blogs, chat rooms, and wikis with their calls for a return to the gold standard make us worry about how useful unmediated political forums can ever really be?

The Candidates on the Web

  • You're a Vanity Fair-reading, Subaru-driving mother of three. You rent a two-bedroom walkup, read your emails late at night, and recently switched from Safari to Firefox. How did we get so smart? We didn't. But Barack Obama did, reports Mike Madden in Salon. The well-oiled campaign's data operation is, says Mike, "an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall." TechPresident's Zephyr Teachout, a Dean campaign veteran, is quoted: "It's not an innovative campaign, but it's an extraordinarily professional one."

  • A President Obama would appoint a National Cyber Advisor with a direct line to the Oval Office. Imagine the awesomely geeky lunches she and the cabinet-level CTO would have in the White House mess.

  • While Barack Obama is skipping Netroots Nation starting today in Austin, Texas, the campaign's deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and new media director Joe Rospars will be there to meet and greet.

  • Last night in New York City, Obama's field video director Arun Chaudhary gave a peek at how professionally-crafted video fits into the campaign. Arun revealed that the Obama new media team, currently numbering around 50, has "pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall."

TechCongress and Beyond

  • Big Media Matt is now Think Tank Matt. Matt Yglesias -- who began blogging in 1982, at the age of one -- has The Atlantic to mount the barricades on behalf of the progressive Center for American Progress. Interesting stuff, this young writers leaving the fuzzy-bordered world of journalism for the fuzzy-bordered advocacy world. Matt, for one, doesn't see this as a big change: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference."

  • Fox News jumps on the Twitter Dome story, reporting that the ongoing crafting of the House's new media rules has "riled Republicans." Rep. John Culberson, quoted in the piece, makes a clarifying point: digital information flows like water these days -- from Qik to Twitter to Flickr -- and so attempting to regulate vessels is a fool's mission.

News Briefs

RSS Feed thursday >

"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

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.

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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

Controversial Hoekstra Microsite Targeting Debbie Stabenow Created By The Prosper Group

Michigan Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra has caused a firestorm in the past 24 hours with a new campaign ad that depicts China as a young woman riding a bike in a rural area speaking in broken English. The thirty second spot aired in Michigan during the Super Bowl on Sunday, and it accuses Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow of aiding ... GO

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