The Web on the Candidates

• The internet not only lets citizens get more involved in politics, but they can also engage in armchair punditry like never before, writes the Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes. And that means an increased interest in inside-baseball sheets — what Gomes calls “process blogs” — like ABC News’ The Note and even this fair site.

• There was a time when it was funny, and a mark of being grounded in the “real world,” to joke about one’s technological ignorance. Newsweek’s Steven Levy reminds us that, for presidential candidates, those days are over: “The vast majority of Americans perform sophisticated digital tasks on a daily basis. Grandmas and grandpas e-mail digital photos of their cruise trip, and IM their kids in school. So a politician admitting that he or she can’t bother to learn those things indicates a horse-and-buggy mentality.” Yeah, but can they use Twitter?

• Inspired by stories of voters — and even superdelegates — being pushed by their children to vote for Barack Obama, a group of activists has launched yrmomma4obama.com. It’s a simple site encouraging young people to text their friends and parents about Obama, offering template suggestions like “Is yr Mama 4 Obama? We need our parents to vote for him 2 win TX on Mar 4. Pass this on to everyone u know and tell your parents how u feel. Gobama!” It would take me about 25 minutes to type all that on a cell phone, but these young’uns are political and technological aces.

• Apparently inspired by the Googlebombing projects of OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers, Right Wing News’ John Hawkins is starting his own campaign, directed at Barack Obama. He wants folks to link to wholesome articles about Obama’s patriotism, spending proposals, and connections to Communists. With material like this, who needs those “Obama is a Muslim” emails?

• It looks like Chris Bowers has discovered Google Trends in a big way. In an exhaustive post on OpenLeft, he outlines the ways it can be used to show momentum for the candidates (this is something we’ve known about for a while). And who’s got the online momentum right now? Take an Obamawild guess.

• MAPLight.org, the site devoted to uncovering the connections between money and politics, has launched a new widget tracking the total campaign contributions to the presidential campaigns. It looks like this:

  

  The idea is not only to be a resource for this information, but, as the press release goes, “a reminder of the sizeable role Money And Politics (MAP) plays in our presidential race.” And look at those numbers from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The numbers are only updated when the FEC releases fundraising data, but it's still a worthy widget to add to your collection.

• A new web project called The Big Word Project (love that name!) from a couple of students in Northern Ireland is "exploring what different words mean to different people." It lets you purchase words for $1 a letter (supercalifragilistic, anyone?) and then make those words link to a site of your choosing. Try searching for "president"...

The Candidates on the Web

• Putting idle speculation to rest, Mike Bloomberg writes an op-ed in today’s New York Times titled, “I’m Not Running for President, but…” In most of the piece Bloomberg addresses that "but..." in the title, writing that the issues Americans care about most are the province of neither Democrats nor Republicans, but of independents like himself. He will endorse the candidate that “takes an independent, nonpartisan approach — and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy.” In this election, there are two such candidates making that claim — where will Bloomie go?

• Ever notice how smooth and consistent Barack Obama’s graphic design is? If not, that probably means it’s working. In an interview with Newsweek’s Andrew Romano, design expert Michael Bieruit explains that Obama is “the first candidate, actually, who’s had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work.” Across the board, from campaign signs to his website, his designers employ the same typeface and design elements. “There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients,” Bieruit says.

In Case You Missed It…

Yesterday Mike Turk got an e-mail from a local Hillary staffer looking for phone bank help, and he was shocked by the subject line before he even opened it. The subject line seemed to imply that no matter what he may have done, no matter how much he may have given, no matter how much time he might have spent talking about Hillary, he had not, in their eyes, "pitched in" yet.

Ralph Nader is announcing his Vice Presidential running mate today at noon, an unorthodox move to some, but required due to the onerous rules regarding petitioning for ballot access in many states. Micah Sifry predicts he will pick former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel.

Marketer Brent Rosengren has embarked on a journey through the wilds of presidential email campaigns, using commercial email marketing standards and practices as a standard, and guess what: ALL of the top-level campaigns fail the test. Colin Delany has the goods.

New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley writes that “Debates give candidates a chance to break loose of YouTube-ification and speak for themselves at length.” But Micah Sifry thinks she couldn’t be more wrong about YouTube.

In honor of the passing of conservative patriarch William F. Buckley, Micah Sifry goes down memory lane, posting a video of an epic showdown between Buckley and Gore Vidal, his liberal doppleganger.