The Web on the Candidates

Michael Falcone at the Caucus rounds up the blogosphere's reaction to news that two of John McCain's top aides were quitting his campaign. Patrick Ruffini and Matt Lewis of Townhall.com share the opinion that McCain failed to put a top aide in charge. "The worst case scenario for any political campaign is for there to be confusion about who is in charge," said Lewis. "Ironically, campaigns are not democracies, they are dictatorships. Let this serve as a lesson that leadership by committee doesn't work in the political battlefield." Falcone also links to comments from Powerline's Paul Mirengott and MyDD's Jonathan Singer, which add to the general sense that McCain's campaign is close to finished.

The New Republic's Michelle Cottle responds to Hillary Clinton's HillCam emails with a much-needed dose of reality: "Come on, guys. I know you want to warm up your gal's image. And I'll admit that she looks cute as a button in that sunshine-yellow top, sucking down soda at the Grinnell Dairy Queen. But don't ask me to believe that these adorable mini movies are any less contrived than an old-fashioned TV ad. Just because you have jittery camera work and zero production values doesn't make your offering 'spontaneous.'" Cottle's assault on "phony Web authenticity" extends beyond Clinton to all of the other candidates and to proclamations about how the Internet is changing campaigning. "Indeed, thus far, what has struck me most about the Brave New World of virtual campaigning is how much it resembles the Tiresome Old World of actual campaigning. Now, instead of relying on scripted debate answers, impersonal rallies, and slick television ads to get to know our candidates, we can turn to scripted blog posts, impersonal e-mails, and slick webcasts." This is not to say that the Internet isn't changing campaigning; but, as Cottle points out, despite the new tools at their disposal, the candidates are still much more comfortable giving the appearance of authenticity than actually being authentic. [Unfortunately, TNR online is subscription-only, so you'll have to register to read the whole thing.]

The Web on the Candidates

Barack Obama's campaign has gone viral, writes Time's Karen Tumulty. "No campaign has been more aggressive in tapping into social networks and leveraging the financial power of hundreds of thousands of small donors," she says. While Obama has been the most successful at utilizing the web to generate micro-donations from 258,000 supporters in the first two quarters of the year, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are also trying their hand at smaller donations and larger communities. After Edwards advisor Joe Trippi made his amusing video of himself baking a pecan pie (Tumulty called it "embarrassingly awkward") with fellow advisor Jonathan Prince, $300,000 came into the campaign, with donations as small as $6.10.

Karen E. Crummy at the Denver Post has discovered two spoof websites that claim to support Sam Brownback. For example, at Baptists for Brownback 2008 you'll read that Brownback believes that the earth is flat, refers to rapes as "unplanned sexual events," and other untruths. Another site, Blogs 4 Brownback, traffics in the same kind of material. Both sites exhibit a kind of comic version of conservatism, making inaccurate, and, depending on your point of view, funny or offensive claims about Brownback's political and religious beliefs. While these sorts of sites present a message control problem for the candidates, Crummy writes that "the impact of parody or critical websites is unclear. In the case of the Brownback sites, some bloggers have bought into the rhetoric and dismissed Brownback and his campaign as 'wingnuts.'" But Richard Davis of Brigham Young University doesn't think they make much of a difference. "Sites like these don't sway undecided voters or push away (Brownback's) supporters. I think the biggest effect is that it's embarrassing for the candidate."

[Eds. note: This is an editorial from the creators of Community Counts, a site that aggregates YouTube Spotlight videos and lets users vote for their favorites, with the goal of “compelling the candidates to answer the questions most valued by the community." We think the group offers a powerful argument for the importance of using YouTube to encourage a two-way conversation between voters and candidates.]

With the 2008 Presidential race underway, it’s clear the Internet is revolutionizing the process of campaigning. Fundraising, mobilization, and the announcement of candidacies have all migrated to the Web. Candidates join social networking sites like MySpace. Viral videos share gaffes alongside electioneered laughs, and the online debates are coming. What we haven’t seen, however, is that most tantalizing of potential benefits: a truly independent, open, and national dialogue—the flattening of democracy. To achieve this, citizens must use the Internet to harness the “wisdom of crowds” and then convince politicians to heed that wisdom.

Esse Quam Videri (to be, rather than to seem), North Carolina’s state motto, might as well be the rallying cry of Internet democracy. The Kennedy-Nixon debate marked the growing importance of image in American politics. It mattered that Nixon wasn’t wearing makeup, and candidates now rely on media consultants. Consequently, many Americans see politicians as a collection of sound bites and glossy imagery. The Internet’s promise is that we can turn this tide by engaging with candidates in unfiltered and direct conversation.

The Web on the Candidates

As we've previously mentioned, CNN and YouTube are co-sponsoring an upcoming Democratic presidential debate on July 23 in Charleston, SC. In a new video announcement, CNN's Anderson Cooper and YouTube's Steve Grove describe the format. YouTube users will submit videos to the site, and some of those will be used as questions for the debate, which will be hosted by Cooper. Another video shows examples of the kind of entries the co-sponsors are looking for: creative videos with red-meat questions about predatory lending in low-income neighborhoods, veteran's benefits, and healthcare.

While it will be interesting to see YouTube move concretely into the political sphere, is this really going to change the tone of the debates in which, as the New York Times' Katherine Seelye describes it, "a guy in a suit asks mostly predictable questions of other suits. The voter is a fixture in the audience, motionless until he or she gets to address the candidate, briefly and respectfully. Everything is choreographed"? She thinks it might, since "the video format opens the door for originality and spontaneity — elements usually foreign to the controlled environment of presidential image-making." All of the Democratic candidates have signed up for the debate, which is the first "official" Democratic debate in that it is being coordinated by the DNC. In the Times piece, Matt Lewis of Townhall recommends that risk-averse Republicans get involved too. "Technology will happen, and the question is whether it will happen for you or to you," he said, paraphrasing Tom Friedman from this year's PdF conference.

The Web on the Candidates

Someone on the Hillary Clinton campaign is obviously leaking stories to Drudge, says Patrick Ruffini. His proof? A Drudge exclusive claiming that Clinton is on track to exceed her first-quarter earnings. Drudge makes it clear as day that this story is a World Exclusive, which does raise the question of who's passing on this information...

Meanwhile, Election Geek is finding major discrepancies between the Drudge story and a Huffington Post story claiming that Clinton has maxed out her big donors and is struggling to keep up with small donations. "So which one is it?" Geek asks. His opinion: "Clinton had a massive donor database she didn’t even come close to tapping. The prevailing wisdom 'out there' was that everyone jumped ship to Obama. My own thought? She purposely didn’t tap that list knowing they were going to do well in Q1 and saved more big donations for Q2."

The Web on the Candidates

Over at TechRepublican, Jim Durbin writes that the way for conservatives to match the energy of the left-wing netroots is to strongly convey Republican messages online. The key, says Durbin, is to stay on message on blogs, discussion boards, social networking sites, everywhere: "If you believe as I do, that our strength is in our reasoned approach to issues - mainly that in winning the arguments, we'll win the elections, than the strategy is simple." Durbin takes for granted that people will simply be won over by better arguments -- there are actually ideologies and political beliefs at stake here -- and his position that "the reasoned argument on the left is outweighed by emotion. On the right, reasoned argument is actually our strength," is not so reasonable in itself... But we give him credit for seeking out ways to invigorate online conservatives.

The Web on the Candidates

Blogpac, a group comprised of MyDDers Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Mike Stark that gives grants to online progressive activists, has awarded $1000 to former John Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte "for her courage in the face of an irresponsible media." Earlier this year, a mini-scandal erupted after conservatives criticized comments Marcotte had written on her Pandagon blog before she was hired by the Edwards campaign. In the post announcing the award, Mike Stark gives us Marcotte's story, from the time she was hired by the campaign (she was working as a financial aid counselor at UT-Austin) to how the cable news sites helped blow the thing out of proportion to how and why she resigned from the campaign.

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post explains that the Democrats are beating the GOP online, getting more traffic, raising more money, and gaining more popularity on the "social-networking triumvirate" of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. TechPresident's Mike Turk says that it goes beyond using the right technologies. "They've all got Web sites. Yes, they're doing videos. Yes, some are blogging. But that's not enough to really connect with voters." And while Republicans are fighting back, with TechPresident's David All forming TechRepublican and former Reagan campaign aide Charlie Gerow starting QubeTV to counter what he calls the "liberal bias" of YouTube, All says "for the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000."

TechPresident is proud to announce a partnership with TubeMogul, a new site that creates beautiful charts that make it easy to track and analyze online video. Although we've built our own charts that show the number of viewers and subscribers for each presidential candidate, we discovered that TubeMogul was providing much more dynamic and interesting charts showing the same information but with plenty of room for innovation, so today, we're replacing our charts with TubeMogul's custom-made charts. For now, they show mostly the same information as our older charts, except that rather than show the number of channel views (which, as you may remember, is problematic), they show the total number of views for each individual video, which we think is a more accurate number. Also, there's some added candy.

The Web on the Candidates

Over at Hotline's On the Download, Shira Toeplitz has a detailed list of how much the candidates are spending online -- both for their web teams and for their sites -- and who they're paying, compiling the first-quarter FEC reports and getting the lowdown herself on who's working where. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton are the biggest spenders, paying $412,000 and $202,000 respectively for their web sites in the first quarter. Dennis Kucinich spent the largest percentage of his budget on his web site, and Chris Dodd and Barack Obama get the most bang for their buck. "Both had Senate Web sites off which they could build, but presentation and features are certainly above par for their price tag." And what's worse, Duncan Hunter and Tommy Thompson having no online staffers at all, or Tom Tancredo paying his one staff member $600?

With news that Rudy Giuliani is planning to "offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days," various interest groups have been voicing opposition to his candidacy, perhaps none as vehemently as the New York ferret lobby, which produced this vicious attack ad called "Ferrets for Freedom" that protests Giuliani's ban on ferrets in New York City in 1999. "People have killed more people than ferrets, so they should ban people, not ferrets," exclaims one outraged ferret. (Hat tip to AirCongress and PrezVid)

The Web on the Candidates

TechPresident blogger David All has started a new blog, TechRepublican.com (nice name David!) that wants to get the Republican establishment to embrace Web 2.0 strategies. "While the Internet has grown rapidly, the Party apparatus and its top officials are operating in a disconnected, Web 0.5 world. The result is that our message is failing to penetrate the modern world where millions of independent voters and modern Republicans spend a majority of their time," All writes. All and friends want to galvanize "Gen Nexters" (ooh, that term hurts) to "think, discuss, read, collaborate, criticize, share, and act to make a difference" in the Republican Party, and to usher the party into the 21st century. It's big project that will benefit from David's bottomless well of energy. We wish him luck. Also check out DomeNation, a weekly show on YouTube with David and Jerome Armstrong which will focus on politics and technology.

Following up on his analysis of who's buying Google text ads for Democratic candidates, Steve Patterson of the Bivings Report takes a look at who's buying ads for the Republicans. In addition to gear from Zazzle.com, several of the candidates are buying ads under others' names. For example, Rudy Giuliani is buying ads for searches for himself, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain, and only Giuliani and McCain are taking out ads against their own sites.