Republicans accelerated their rhetorical assaults against President Obama on Thursday, hitting him hard in speeches and online over gas prices as those prices rise, and Obama’s poll numbers go down. The Republican ... Read More

PDM editorial director Micah L. Sifry spent last Friday through Monday at South by SouthWest Interactive, attending panels, keynotes and hanging out. Here's his report: SXSW is still a place where sessions packed with thousands of attendees cheer for the iconoclasts and the game-changers. It is also much more of a business networking conference than an internet futurists' playpen. In short, it has a split personality. Read More

Is the Internet empowering voters as much as it did in 2004 and 2008? Or have campaigns regained the upper hand, with their sophisticated use of data-mining? That was the question we debated Sunday afternoon in Austin, at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference. Read More

What was unusual about an evening Super Tuesday gathering in San Francisco was that many of the people there aren't working in a startup aimed at making some commercial aspect of life easier, faster and more fun. Instead, they are part of a generation of people with both political and tech savvy, using the web to fundamentally alter politics in general and specific campaigns in particular. For these people, the promise of a networked world and a new, networked politics — where people connecting outside the by-all-accounts-flawed and scandal-fraught party apparatus are starting to make an impact — is coming into focus. And rather than using their knowledge of the technology world to start the next Facebook, they're building a cadre of Silicon Valley companies that work in public affairs — not just non-profits, government, and civic life, but politics and campaigns. Read More

"There's a non-trivial number of evangelicals who believe that if we have a Mormon president, that will 'legitimize' Mormonism, and make it more acceptable in their minds, and therefore more and more people will become Mormon, and if you believe that Mormonism isn't Christianity, then more and more people are going to go to hell," explained Charles Mitchell, a onetime conservative activist and co-author of the blog Evangelicals for Mitt. "Sometimes, some people will tell us pretty directly that 'You are sending people to hell.'"

All of a sudden, campaigns everywhere are literally begging for as little as $3 in their email fundraising pitches. Are Americans tapped out? Or is something else going on here? Read More