Cross-published from Epolitics.com

Not content to have started the "Demon Sheep" meme that gave such joy to so many earlier in the month, California's Carly Fiorina decided to relaunch her "Call Me Barbara" microsite this week -- said "relaunch" apparently consisting of a single Twitter post. But what the heck, it gives us a chance to tear the site to shreds with great glee and no little abandon.

First, just the facts (ma'am). The site's raison d'être is to highlight incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's upbraiding of an Army general for repeatedly referring to her by the female honorific rather than as "Senator" during a hearing -- pretty thin gruel for a scandal, though not Boxer's best moment as an elected official. But thin gruel pretty well defines "Call Me Barbara," a website that's as sloppy as it is light on content.

Cross-published from Epolitics.com

Put this one in the "hoist with her own petard" category: in the same week that Republican gubernatorial senatorial candidate (and former H-P CEO) Carly Fiorina launches an attack site against party rival Tom Campbell ("a.k.a. Taxin' Tom"), state Democrats put her squarely in their cross-hairs with an online hit-job of their own.

Fiorina's FCINO.com ("Fiscal Conservatives In Name Only") takes Campbell to task over the mortal sin of increasing taxes, featuring a very exciting wolf-in-sheep's-clothing video that includes the Robot Sheep Of Doom shown in the image to the right (full video clip below). The site's basically a one-pager, with a brief summary of the charges against the accused along with the clever extra of a "Report a [FCINO] Sighting"] button, of course matched with an equally prominent donations button.

Cross-published from Epolitics.com

Are Democrats doomed in 2010, with an energized Republican Party capitalizing on a backlash against a young president's ambitious agenda to seize control of Congress a la 1994? Not likely -- particularly if Democratic candidates learn from the Obama campaign and use the internet to help make sure that their supporters are the ones who show up to vote in November.

First, the background: the party of the president in office essentially always loses seats in the mid-term elections (2002 was a post-9/11 one-off), a tendency likely to be reinforced in 2010 by the fact that so many Democrats rode the Obama wave to win marginal districts in '08. Plus, this year many progressive activists are turned off by what they perceive to be a failed healthcare reform bill, while others oppose Obama's expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Add into the mix on the other side a fired-up movement of Tea Partiers and Sarah Palin fans and you have what looks like the recipe for a massive Democratic defeat in eleven months.

Here's a sign that the Tea Party movement intends to be a force in politics for years to come -- some of its leaders are trying to build the foundation of a powerful online fundraising and organizing presence. Some hints about what they're up to:

• Developing an online fundraising apparatus modeled after Obama's small-donor operation. According to a Post article last week, "We're looking at the potential of raising small checks from a vast number of donors, just as Obama did," [Freedom Works President Matt] Kibbe said. "We've been studying everything about the Obama primary strategy, and I happen to think the tea party movement could make even the Obama grass-roots machine look obsolete."

The Conclusion to How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010, now available for download at Epolitics.com

Winning in 2010

2010 will not be 2008: for one thing, we aren't likely to see the massive voter turnout that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. As in other political off-years, the 2010 results will swing on the decisions of a relatively small number of voters, an effect that will be magnified down the chain -- the smaller the race, the more effect a handful of votes can have. This kind of environment obviously encourages a focus on getting as many core supporters to the polls as possible.

As we've seen in this series, the internet absolutely excels at maintaining connections with individual voters and at energizing them to recruit their friends, donate their money and volunteer their time. The 2010 elections won't be determined by the internet alone (candidates and ideas do matter!), but campaigns that employ online strategies intelligently and with real-world goals in mind should have a significant edge over their rivals, particularly in tight races.

Part Four of How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010

What Dean and Kerry suggested in 2004, Barack Obama proved in 2008: an army of motivated online donor/volunteers can be a truly decisive force in politics. And with software designed to allow campaigns to tap the enthusiasm (and the wallets) of supporters both within their districts and around the country now widely available (see Chapter Two), 2010 should see an explosion of online fundraising at the state and local levels.

It helps a campaign immensely if most individual donations, even the big ones, come in online rather than as paper checks. First, money collected via credit cards is available instantly, allowing a candidate to take immediate advantage of an overnight surge of income. Plus, online donation details automatically end up in a database, simplifying accounting and reporting. By contrast, physical checks present a logistical burden, since each has to be processed individually whether it's collected at a fundraising dinner or arrives in the mail.

Cross-posted from Epolitics.com

Here at e.politics, we're happy to read things so you don't have to -- though it this case you should, because David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win is a great read and one hell of a glimpse into the strategy, tactics and execution of a remarkably successful political operation.

Suspecting the book's value as a resource in the future, I took extensive notes as I read through it -- essentially creating an index of every substantive mention of online politics in the book, which I've reprinted below as a resource for y'all, along with a few links to relevant e.politics articles (the current edition of the book doesn't include its own actual index, unfortunately).

Cross-posted from Epolitics.com

Just off a conference call to promote Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's new (and so-far excellent) book about the 2008 race, which I'm currently about 3/4 of the way through -- more about that soon. On the call, though, I got to ask a question about the behind-the-scenes smear emails that circulated regularly throughout the campaign -- what did the campaign do to respond that was most effective, and how should future political operations reply to similar tactics?

Plouffe's response was that campaigns need to take negative messages spread online from person to person as seriously as they would a negative TV ad or a direct attack from an opponent in a public appearance, providing yet another example of the extent to which the Obama team understood the changed media environment in which they ran. Conventional political wisdom might be to ignore below-the-radar attacks to avoid giving them credence, Plouffe said, but in the internet era a story that arrives in a million email inboxes matters even if it doesn't lead the news.

Part Three of How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010, cross-posted from Epolitics.com

Once a campaign has the basic technology in place, it can begin to take full advantage of the internet's ability to deliver donors, volunteers and voters. With new social communities like blogs, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter creating fresh fishing holes, much of a campaign's online outreach will take place in very public venues.

But politicians and their staffs can also reach out behind the scenes, for instance sending emails or Facebook messages to selected bloggers, Twitterers and activists, usually in the hope of creating connections that will lead to more public affirmations of support. Campaigns can target online advertising with a different kind of precision, reaching people with appeals and messages that match the content they're reading or the keywords they enter into a search engine.

The variety of outreach outlets available to online communicators can be overwhelming, so let's start with a few basic principles to help sort out the options.

Part Two of How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010. Cross-posted from Epolitics.com

Online politics may look new, but most of what a campaign does over the internet is really just a reincarnation of some classic political act. For instance, think of a website as the electronic version of a storefront office, while the process of working with bloggers is a lot like old-school print or broadcast media relations.

But compared with traditional political tools, the internet truly excels at maintaining relationships with many people at once. Channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and in particular email connect campaigns directly with their donors and volunteers, providing a means to distribute news, messaging points, event invitations and appeals for time and money. With planning and effort, the connection can go both ways, letting a campaign actively tap the social connections and even the creativity of its supporters.