It's days like this one when it makes perfectly wonderful sense to have a crack digital photographer on White House staff and an agile new media team in place to get his content distributed far and wide. The White House now owns the iconic image of the moment when Arlen Specter switched parties and put Democrats within sniffing distance of 60 votes in the Senate.

Man does that phone have a lot of buttons!

An addendum to that last post about what the new New Media Department has cooking up in its quest to revitalize the GOP and regain a foothold in official Washington, at a time when Democrats control the House, Senate, and White House. Republican Party headquarters has been spending its energies putting together an online "Welcome Memo Generator" that auto-constructs snarky messages of greeting for new Democratic Senator Arlen Specter.

Playing along is simple, if the personality-shifting required is convoluted. You, Average Jane or Joe, assumes the role of a high profile Democratic official. You can select to be "Senator Harry," "Speaker Nancy," or "Senator Chris D." -- that's Connecticut's Chris Dodd, for those of you not up on the list of latest Republican targets. For good measure, you can also choose to be the dread White House TelePrompter.

Select a character/machine to play, and out pops a welcome message for Senator Specter. You'll no doubt have guessed that those notes of welcome are really a chance to air favorite Republican charges against those officials. For Reid, it's land deals in Vegas. For Pelosi, it's flights on military plans. For Dodd, it's mortgages he received on his home.

As for the White House TelePrompter, turns out that inanimate piece of equipment is guilty of placing the country in hock to forces abroad: "Welcome to the Democrats. I look forward to working together to borrow more money from China and the Middle East."

Tyler Gernant, a Democratic candidate running for Montana's sole House seat, is engaged in what's likely a tech-politics first: campaiging by Kindle. Gernant has made his policy papers available as a $.99 download on the e-reader. About a third of the proceeds will go to plant trees in Montana. No word on how many Montanans have Kindles -- Amazon doesn't release its sales figures for the product. (Gernant doesn't make a point of it, but Montanas might also read his stuff using the free iPhone Kindle reader.) But for what it's worth, I just got a Kindle. And while it's still early on in our relationship, I'm pretty madly in love with the thing.

The Senator from Arizona, up for re-election in 2010, emails to note that he's relaunched his JohnMcCain.com site. There are signs that McCain has picked up a few tricks of late. The first is that his announcement email was just a few compact paragraphs, rather than the "Tolstoy in my inbox" of past missives. And the new site's Social Network tab features a pre-packaged tweet that you can use to post a note of support to Twitter. McCain has actually been one of the more accessible, human, and enjoyable politicians to take to Twitter.

Some things don't change, though. McCain still loves him a black website background. Maybe it's not a style choice, though. Maybe it's part of his energy conservation plan.

There's something interesting going on over on Senator Arlen Specter's Facebook wall. Hundreds of people--many, if not all of them, constituents of the Pennsylvania Democrat (who was not long ago a Republican)--are posting short messages urging him to defend the Clean Air Act, which has been weakened in the House version of President Obama's pending climate legislation. Same with Senator Dianne Feinstein's and Facebook walls. A kind of digital picket line has formed, with a steady beat of posts appearing from the Senator's fans online.