Presidential silver medalist John McCain jumped back into the political fray yesterday with the launch of a "grassroots organization" called Country First...Speaking of the PACs you launch after you don't quite make it to the White House, Democracy for America -- the organization that grew out of Howard Dean's presidential run -- is putting some pressure on his apparent successor as Democratic National Committee Chairman...It's worth reading the L.A. Times' Kate Linthicum's interview with Scott Goodstein, who headed up the text messaging program for the Obama campaign, just to hear what question prompted this answer: "South Carolina. Oprah Winfrey"...and more.

(Crossposted from ClickZ.)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million. Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

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The half dozen contenders for the post of RNC chairman gathered yesterday for an event that was threaded through with what might fairly be called an obsession with technology...When we discussed a report in the New York Times yesterday that Barack Obama would finally (cue whiny voice) be naming a Chief Technology Officer this Wednesday, we commented, "we'll see." Well, looks like we won't...The Obama transition has gone down a somewhat different road than Bill Clinton in revealing its donors -- though, of course, the motivations and expectations are entirely different...and more.

FOX 5 of Washington D.C. went to the McCain/Palin campaign fire sale in Arlington, Virginia on Thursday and purchased a couple of dead Blackberries. After powering them up with new batteries, the reporters found that normal security protocols that should have been adhered to by the campaign to remove data from the devices had been glossed over. They found them full of confidential campaign contact information as well as some e-mail.

(Reposted from ClickZ)

Barack Obama and John McCain duked it out till the very end online, with ads that went after specific audiences in important swing states. Sites across the Web were drowned in hundreds of millions of Obama's voter registration and state-targeted early voting ads in the final weeks. Meanwhile, the McCain camp attacked, asked for cash, and played the Palin card in display ads more focused on persuading voters than the campaign's earlier ads had been. Joe the Plumber made an appearance, too, of course.

This election had many firsts, but before we move on entirely to the new administration, the special meaning evoked November 4 by rejuvenating American democracy should not be undervalued. Not only did voters come out in droves waiting hours at the polls, but they celebrated the act of voting in new ways online, and they're still showing pride in the process.

It's been clear for some time that the McCain campaign is way behind the Obama campaign in all kinds of social media metrics. But maybe all that webby stuff doesn't matter as much as the ability to turn out the troops on the ground. But it doesn't look like the McCain phone banking operation is anywhere as big as Obama's.

We've been arguing for a while here on techPresident that the candidate who best used the internet to enable his supporters to join in co-creating the campaign would have a big edge come November. Now we're seeing what Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, called the rise of the "long tail of politics": tremendous metrics as the Obama get-out-the-vote operation goes into the final stretch. Those numbers include 50,000 new events organized using myBO in the last three weeks, at least 20,000 neighborhood team leaders, 1.9 million newly registered voters, and 13.3 million voter contacts.

When a top Republican official in Florida reports getting 7 phone calls from Obama volunteers (because she signed up on the Obama site to keep track of its activities), and none from McCain volunteers, you know something is up. Here's a quick look under the hood of the Obama calling operation.

How much is YouTube worth to a presidential campaign? We got some friends to run the numbers for Obama and McCain, and the numbers may astound you.