Daily Digest: VetVoice Scores a Coup

The Web on the Candidates

• Joe Biden’s “a noun, a verb, and 9/11” quip about Rudy Giuliani at a recent Democratic debate lives on as a Facebook app called the Giuliani Quote Generator. Once you add it to your account, a random, absurdist phrase incorporating the above elements (“Ashley understands the sanctity of marriage after the events of 9/11,” “He protects America in this great country due to the lessons of 9/11”) will show up in a box on your profile, with a grinning Giuliani beside it. Cute.

• TechPresident’s parent site Personal Democracy Forum is a happy co-sponsor of the Off The Bus Polling Project, which is designed “to get to the bottom of how pollsters conduct their surveys, how they gather and build their stats, how they target who they contact, and, ultimately, how they reach their conclusions.” It’s a simple project: if you’ve been polled about the election, share your experience with Off The Bus, which will, at some point, publish the results of their meta-poll. If this helps initiate a slow death to the disproportionate influence polls have on election coverage, or helps smoke out more push-polling, we’re all for it.

• More and more sites are getting into the question game. Our own 10Questions, of course, is one of them, but other sites are getting into it too. One of these is Capitol News Connection’s Ask Your Lawmaker, a Digg-like site on which anyone can post a question to a Member of Congress and the public will vote on their favorites. The CNC’s team of journalists will then ask lawmakers the top questions (they say they’ll ask at least 10 questions a day). It's also being deployed by NPR for their Democratic debate on December 4th. The project is pushing its widgets to help get the word out — embed one today!

• So Markos Moulitsas and Karl Rove are columnists for Newsweek, and some good old-fashioned partisanship should invigorate things, right? We definitely haven’t had enough of it. William Beutler, the Blog P.I., investigates Newsweek’s most-viewed and emailed charts to see if they new columnists are a hit, and one thing is clear: Rove is inspiring more interest than Kos. Rove’s column about how to beat Hillary Clinton was the sixth most-emailed Newsweek article a day after it was published, while Kos’ article about the candidates focusing on Bush’s record was the tenth most-emailed. And while Rove’s was the most viewed, Kos didn’t even break the top ten. In the blogosphere it was the same: Rove’s piece had been linked to more than four times as much as Kos’ article. Does this point to superior punditry on Rove’s part, or are people emailing and linking to it to trash it?

• I don’t know how I feel about this: a video taken from the Morning Joe show with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC shows a clip of Barack Obama getting a tad heated with a questioner in Iowa when asked how he would protect the country. Scarbourough and his guests — predictably, I guess — are more concerned with Obama’s tone than his content (“Isn’t his approach a little unseemly?”). It’s been viewed more than 66,000 times on YouTube; do viewers agree that Obama was being “unseemly” or are they upset with the show?

• The nichification of election sites continues. VoteVets.org, an online hub for progressive veterans, has launched VetVoice, an offshoot dedicated to covering veterans’ issues in the race. It officially went live this morning, and did so with some buzz: every presidential candidate was invited to post, and as of this writing John Edwards and Ron Paul have done so, and Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all agreed to post by the end of the day. Congrats on the coup, VetVoice!

• It had to happen sooner or later: an illustrated opinion piece from Ward Sutton in the New York Times this weekend takes a look at the campaigns’ logos. In a fun, comic-style slide show Sutton critiques the Obama logo (“Too many type styles and colors”) and describes why the Bush-Cheney ‘04 logo was so good (“Appealing to base: White letters on blue background — like Fox News”).

• Taking off on this idea, LogoVoting let's the public vote on the their favorite logos. It's a great idea but unfortunately it's broken at the moment. Hurry up and fix it, I wanna vote!

The Candidates on the Web

• In a stark change from off-the-cuff, handheld-looking campaign videos, Barack Obama has released a three-part video series detailing Obama’s health plan. It’s targeted at New Hampshire primary voters, and features statements from New Hampshire policy experts and testimonials from regular folks. It’s a slick, smartly-packaged video that reminds us a bit of John McCain’s strong war-hero documentary, which was released a couple of months ago and may have helped kick-start his campaign.

• TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is on a roll. Fresh from audio interviews with Mitt Romney and John McCain, he’s released a text interview with John Edwards. Arrington, who’s been focusing on issues of interest to the Silicon Valley set, asked Edwards about broadband access, clean energy, China, the details on his tech policies. Arrington’s racking up quite a resource for tech-minded voters; keep it up!

In Case You Missed It…

Who will be America's First techPresident? Micah Sifry judges the Democratic candidates’ tech policies and positions according to criteria we outlined in a petition earlier this year. They each get a letter grade: Edwards gets an A-, Biden a B, Clinton a B-, Obama an A-, Richardson a C-, Dodd a C-, Kucinich a D, and Gravel gets an F.