The word came via email on Monday that Danny Glover, a veteran editor with National Journal and other publications, had taken over the editor's role at Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report. The Tweet Watch Report was itself launched by techPres contributor David All's David All Group early last month, a daily email tracking what members of Congress, members of the press, and other relevant people are saying and doing on Twitter.

Glover's new gig is an interesting little mix of the state of modern journalism, new media, and old school politics, and so I asked him to walk me through his vision for the product. With the caveat that he's only been on the job three days now, Glover says he sees Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report as having a two-pronged goal. The first is providing those people working in and around Congress with an easy way to get a sense of what's going down on Twitter, much in the way that The Hotline's Blogometer tracks what's being said on blogs. "I look at it as a news barometer of what people on Capitol Hill care about, what they're watching, what they think is important," he says. "Members of Congress and their staff need to be informed, at a minimum. Even if they don't use Twitter themselves, they need to be aware of what people are saying." The second, though, is to increase the pool of those on the Hill using Twitter by encouraging non-adopter members and staffers to model their tweeting colleagues...

1. Extending our public health programs, through an integrated communications strategy.
2. Bringing up-to-date and accurate information to support health decision making where people are already spending time, and listening to what our audiences.
3. Repurposing content through free or low-cost open-source tools, often requiring minimal technical knowledge.
4. Knowing when not to use new media and revisiting our websites.
5. Understanding we need to learn more about the power of mobile.
6. Integrating new media into discussions on health information technology and health care reform.
7. Building partnerships.
8. Learning from our colleagues.
9. Having a two-way conversation and supporting peer-generated content.
10. Evaluating what we do and sharing our lessons learned with each other.

What the team behind AIDS.gov says they learned in 2009 about what new media is good at doing. Worth noting is that the team -- officially, employees of the Department of Health and Human Services -- has been aggressive in sharing what it thinks it knows about new media with the health of the public health and federal government worlds, putting together guides on how to use new media to fulfill your mission. Public health, what with its mandate to inform the public and the number of different players whose ability to work well together is key to our survival, is one area where connective technologies have (largely unrealized) tremendous potential, so it's worth keeping an eye on what these folks are doing.

There is something oddly captivating about the White House Flickr feed. For all its staged quality, getting a daily peek at the inner-workings of the big white building offers a compelling glimpse of want goes on inside the highest-levels of government. Some of the most compelling shots are the most prosaic, like the image of a White House staffer with a radio stuffed down the back of her dress. Then there's the occasional look at the principles -- President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama -- doing the things that all humans do, but that are striking when the humans involved are the American President and his coterie. Here a strangely wiry and casually clad Obama prepares to receive an H1NI vaccination from a White House nurse. Is that cashmere?

One place where the Internet has changed American politics most dramatically is where it comes to the political press. In the U.S., media and politics are so completely intertwined as to often be two parts of the same whole. Coverage shapes action, action molds coverage, and personalities in and out of political officialdom mix and mingle to become the most powerful force guiding what comes out of the political process. That's what makes this little dust-up over the admittance of reporters from two "new media" upstarts -- Talking Points Memo's Christina Bellantoni and the Washington Times' Sam Stein -- to the White House press pool so fascinating. Press pool reporters provide coverage where space or other limitations make it difficult for the full White House press corps to participate. The photo above suggests it's glamorous work.

Pool service is something like cooking communal dinner in a group house. And some in the Washington media world aren't happy with who's going to be taking turns doing the cooking...

As others have noted, David Plouffe's book on his time as campaign manager of Obama for America is surprisingly open and candid, more Dreams from my Father than the anodyne Audacity of Hope. Even only a few dozen pages in, there are revealing glimpses of the role that technology, the Internet, and the Obama '08 new media team played billion-dollar organization that Plouffe engineered. From the outside, the machine seemed well-oiled. Inside, things were not always so smooth. There are tantalizing glimpses of how new media interacted, sometimes not without friction, with the more traditional elements of a presidential campaign, particularly fundraising and field. Plouffe on building a new media team:

The new media group (online communications, Web-page development and maintenance, texting) in most campaigns reports to the communications department, and its department head is not considered an equal of other senior staff. But I saw how important the burgeoning online world was to our overall success; new media would touch just about every aspect of our campaign. So I had that department report directly to me. To find us new talent we enlisted one of Barack's law school classmates, Julius Genachowski, who was steeped in the technology world. He identified our director of new media, Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's revolutionary new media effort in 2004. Joe seemed to relish the challenge of marrying digital technology and strategy with a strong grassroots campaign.

And here he is on the early tensions between the new media team and those ultimately responsible for raising the tremendous amounts of money to mount a credible primary challenge against Hillary Clinton:

We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.

Here's hoping that sort of transparency holds up past page 54.

Television is still king. Printed mailers are second in line to the throne. And somewhere, waiting out in the castle courtyard, is the joker that is new media.

That's the lesson from a close reading of the campaign finance reports filed in the race for the Governor's mansion in Virginia, a race which ended with Republican ex-State Attorney General Bob McDonnell trumping Democratic State Senator Creigh Deeds, McDonnell with 59% of the vote to Deeds' 41%. Overall, McDonnell outspent Deeds some $19.6 million to $15.3 million (despite the fact that McDonnell had no real opposition for his party's nomination). But when it came to pouring money into TV and radio, the two candidates were on fairly even footing. According to records provided and helpfully categorized by the Virginia Public Access Project, both the winner and loser in the Virginia gubernatorial race dropped some $10 million on television and radio ads, making up 49% of the Republican's total spending through October 21st, the date of the most recent campaign finance filings, and 65% of the Democrat's full budget. When it comes to traditional mail, McDonnell paid out some $1.5 million in printed mailers, including the cost of postage. Deeds spent about half a million.

Then we move on down the line to new media...

CARS.gov, the Department of Transportation's online home for its Cash-for Clunkers program, has posted the raw data on the nearly 700,000 cars that were traded in during the course of the month-long program. (via Paul Blumenthal)

There's an interesting subtext here that goes beyond a simple government data dump. Cash for Clunkers one of the financial revitalization projects that the Obama Administration is most desperately interested in having the public embrace as a proactive, forward-thinking, and innovative solution to a sticky economic problem. Cash for Clunkers is one simple, voter-friendly victory the Obama White House thinks it can reliably point to as evidence of its vision. What the Obama White House and the extended executive branch are really worried about is that what they see as the enormous success of the problem dies a death of a thousand cuts, slowly weakened by the blog chatter and other online doubting that "Clunkers" has attracted, particularly from conservatives. That accumulation of doubt is potentially as damaging as a direct hit, and the Obama White House sees Cash for Clunkers as an ally whose reputation it has to protect with all the tactics it knows.

That's why we see the White House blog going toe-to-toe with the automotive website Edmunds.com, not traditionally considered a worthy sparring partner of the President of the United States. Think of it as a "broken window theory" approach to the new media environment. And that's why we see the Secretary of the Treasury himself high-fiving the White House blog for challenging Edmunds' analysis of the utility of the clunkers program. "A big 'Thank you' to the White House blog team for a witty and perceptive account of Cash for Clunkers' real contribution to our economic recovery," blogged Ray LaHood.

Someone intimately familiar with the White House's thinking on its approach to the new media environment explained why the Obama Administration is pursuing such a tactic. Part of what makes the Internet valuable to the Obama operation, the thinking goes, is that suddenly the White House isn't quite so utterly dependent on the traditional press' interpretation of what the White House is up to on a day-to-day basis. Administration officials aren't so limited to giving a reporter a quote or delivering an answer at a press conference and then seeing what the mainstream media makes of it. That's appealing to an Obama White House that, like many White Houses, is skeptical of just how good the press' intentions are. The web doesn't just offer the benefit of spin. The Internet's environment of abundance and direct connection to its audience means that the White House can not only put out information into the new media ecosystem, back it with heaps of background materials, and then attach to it its own meaning of that data, or quote, or new policy change.

Take White House ethics watchdog Norm Eisen's recent blog post on the release of the White House visitor logs that contain the names of such politically-charged visitors as the minister Jeremiah Wright and the filmmaker Michael Moore. But with the podium of the White House blog, Eisen can not only make those records public but also craft what the White House thinks is the proper interpretation of them. There's less of a need today to rely on professional reporters to see things accurately, or to handle nuance correctly.

When Eisen released the first batch of the White House visitor logs, for example, he offered instructions on how to interpret the new abundance of information the White House was releasing into the world. "Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few 'false positives' -- names," like those of Wright and Moore, "that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else." When it comes to Cash for Clunkers, the Obama Administration also isn't taking any chances. Alongside the XLS and CSV files that the administration hopes will be used to bolstered its case about how successful Cash for Clunkers was is a "Note to Analysts" with helpful instructions on how to best make sense of the new information. (Photo credit: ThreadedThoughts)

In 2000, candidates used e-mail and websites to transmit their messages online. 2004 introduced political blogs, and in 2008, social media played a major role in the election. As the 2010 election approaches and we look to 2012, what's next?

We submitted a panel to the South by Southwest Interactive Panel Picker process that will delve into this topic. Panelists will be Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, Giselle Schmitz, Sarah Granger and Nancy Scola.

As a friend on Capitol Hill pointed out to me yesterday, even the Congressional Bourbon Caucus has an issue to rally around. It's not a drinking club -- they're committed to protecting and promoting the production of that wonderfully delicious elixir. (Your country thanks you.) A similar thing can be said of the African Great Lakes Caucus, the Parkinson's Disease Caucus, the Shellfish Caucus -- even the Congressional Baby Caucus (seriously), which is of course united by their great love for all things baby. (The full and rather varied list of House caucuses is here.)

But as the Republican New Media Caucus and the new Joe Sestak-led Congressional Caucus on Blogging and New Media take their tentative first steps, the important open question is becoming whether these members of Congress appreciate that there are, indeed, real policy and political issues at stake. Getting more members of Congress tweeting away is one thing. But there's a bigger opportunity that these "new media" caucuses can seize. That's re-architecting the political process in ways that expand the participation of the citizenry and empower voters with greater knowledge of what Congress is up to, even and perhaps especially when it becomes politically uncomfortable to do so.

As things stand, though, these caucuses look a lot like self-involved efforts to upgrade the messaging operations of Hill staff...

Talking Points Memo reports that Washington State Rep. Dave Reichert screened a home-brewed video at this week's Republican Conference meeting in an effort to show how new media can help the GOP reach young voters. Where Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" song is an upbeat encouragement to folks to get their boogie on, "Just Tax" is a mournful reproach of the Obama Administration's spending. And while it's billed as a parody, it's actually rather earnest. A sample lyric: "This shouldn't happen, man. Go on and ask Japan. Remember the nineteen-nineties. [Google it.]"

A Reichert spokesperson told CNN that the rep "wanted to show his colleagues the video to encourage them to get young people involved using new media, and noted his district is home to a cluster of technology companies.” (Thanks Josh Sherman for passing it along.)