The Web on the Candidates

• From the mouth of the candidate to the tubes of the people! Will.I.Am’s “Yes I Can” video is spreading across the web, and like a cow fertilizing fields in its wake, videos are popping up around it. First came the anti-McCain “john.he.is”; now comes “No, You Can’t — No, Se Puede,” featuring a satiric cast of Republican stereotypes kickin’ it for the status quo. In light of this renewed interest in pro-candidate tuneage, songs, an older pro-Clinton video is being dusted off, if only so we can laugh at it. As Newsweek’s Andrew Romano puts it, the uplifting Hillary4U&Me “sounds sort of like a commercial jingle for a used futon store circa 1979, only less catchy.” It is pretty bad. I laugh every time it starts, though I can’t stop listening… am I a masochist? (Micah also embeds the videos and asks whether the left has a monopoly on satire.)

• Earlier this week Zephyr Teachout called for a petition to urge superdelegates to affirm the popular vote. Now Change.org’s Danny Moldovan has started a petition on that site and on Facebook to “demand that only pledged delegates who have been chosen in fair and democratic elections decide the nomination.” MoveOn and Democracy for America have launched their own petitions to do the same. Similarly, OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers announced the Superdelegate Transparency Project, a joint project of LiteraryOutpost.com, OpenLeft and Congresspedia (Congresspedia is funded by the Sunlight Foundation, for which techPresident’s Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej are advisors). It will compile the district-by-district voting results and delegate counts in primary and caucus states and track them against the pledges of superdelegates, with the goal of gauging "what effect the superdelegates have on the nomination," with the goal of opening up the Democratic nomination process, too. With so much speculation about them, are superdelegates are the hanging chads of 2008?

• Confused about the candidates’ delegate totals? Check out the LA Times’ very cool delegate count visualizer, which lets you roll over the faces of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee to discover the number of delegates they’ve won in each state. Sometimes it just takes a cool graphic to make us understand these things. (Thanks, Craig!)

The Candidates on the Web

• Come on, I need me some McCain-iana! Can’t someone do something online for John McCain? In a voter-generated drought, there’s always McCainBlogette, which isn’t exactly voter-generated (it’s written by McCain’s 24-year-old daughter, Meghan) but it’ll do for now. The latest updates: viewers write in to say how much they love the blog; Meghan is sick; and her little brother Jack, who has the same chiseled look his father once had, fills in and shares some factoids about his life, including his love for Steve McQueen, his passion for scuba diving, and his talent for languages (he speaks broken Farsi, Japanese, Spanish and some Afrikaans). But the big question is left unanswered: is he single?

• In honor of Valentine's Day: While searching for background on Meghan McCain, we stumbled upon a cute section of About.com: Marriage! Therein lies descrioptions of all of the candidates' marriages: Cindy and John McCain, Michelle and Barack Obama, Hill and Bill, Janet and Mike Huckabee, Carol and Ron Paul. Looking for Whitney and Mike Gravel? Here it is. You just can't make this stuff up: "What You Can Learn From the Marriage of Michelle and Barack Obama: Barack and Michelle understand the importance of putting a priority on their time together. Even with both of their busy schedules, Barack and Michelle make time for one another." Sheri and Bob Stritof, alas, do not tell us what we can learn from Bill and Hillary's marriage.

• Got Hopi? Voters from the left and right have praised Barack Obama’s “we are the ones we have been waiting for” phrase (even if most of us would be hard-pressed to explain what, exactly, it means), but some are claiming he lifted the phrase from a bit of Hopi wisdom. The Washington Post’s Garance Franke-Ruta has picked up on a “round of intellectual badminton” being played across the web by folks eager to discover the truth. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg and Adam Gopnik traded pithy passages about its origin, and digging into the idea that Obama is the Neo of politics, the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg goes down a slippery path, comparing Obama’s message to that of fascists, bolsheviks and… Native Americans, a post which was subsequently picked up by the Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias. Fascism? Sigh. Does it always have to come back to the Nazis? Franke-Ruta consults Amazon.com, that 21st-century oracle, and finds — suprise! — that the phrase is a title of an Alice Walker book, among other things. In short: it's been around. Obama didn’t invent it, and neither did Goebbels.

In Case You Missed It…

After watching a lame pro-Hillary video, Micah Sifry asks if the left simply has a monopoly on funny satire, or if Final Cut Pro only works on computers owned by progressives? Or is it something in the water? What makes some people “viderate” and others embarrassingly illiterate in what works with online video?

Watching Obamamania unfold over the last few days, Patrick Ruffini has gradually come to the realization that we are living through the first Presidential campaign that is being marketed like a high-end consumer brand.

A large chunk of this presidential election is shaping up to be about tone: big change vs. little change, hope vs. experience, writes Garrett Graff. To see how these ideas are manifesting themselves among voters, one needs to look no further than Zazzle.com, the online site where people can design their own bumper stickers, buttons, and t-shirts.