The Web on the Candidates

• Mitt Romney is the latest Republican candidate to take home a gold in a primary, winning Michigan last night (well, he won Wyoming, but does that count?). After Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and now Romney have won big primaries, it’s clear that there’s no GOP frontrunner. Now it’s a fight to the finish, and to come up with the most preposterous war metaphors. The next few months are “going to be like the Bataan Death March,” a Romney advisor said. Wow, 10,000 people will be killed on the way to the GOP nomination? Politics sure is a brutal sport!

• We’re not sure how responsible DailyKos is for Mitt’s victory — Markos had implored his readers in Michigan to vote for Romney — but diarist Kagro X is happy to take some of the the credit. “Yes, Daily Kos has done its part in perpetuating the candidacy of the flip-flopping, free-spending billionaire who can make the primary season… hilarious,” Kagro X wrote. Meanwhile MyDD’s Todd Beeton has proof that the majority of Dems went to McCain, not Romney.

• Ron Paul, who finished fourth in Michigan ahead of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, has a new fighter in his corner. Über-conservative (or is that ur-conservative?) Richard Viguerie has launched UltimateRonPaul.com, a site that is all about taking action to “advance liberty in the U.S. with Ron Paul.” The guiding philosophy of the site seems to be “Click Here,” a command which is repeated throughout. If you do so you’ll a bunch of ways to help spread Paul’s message and express your own voice. It’s the latest in a series of voter-created sites that are vastly more influential than Paul’s own, though Viguerie is the deacon of list-building, and this project might just be an effort by him to vacuum up the names of lots of Ronulans.

• Wired’s increasingly essential Sarah Lai Stirland has a great piece on twin brothers Alex and Brett Harris, the co-founders of a voter-created site called Hucksarmy.com, which has become a major grassroots, if unofficial, component of Mike Huckabee’s outreach to evangelicals. TechPresident’s David All tells Stirland that social conservatives have “been social networking without the proper tools for years, and now they’re using some of that well-organized online elbow grease to help forward their cause.” Could this be another example of onffline support?

• True to its community-above-all style, Slashdot is conducting one of its patented reader-generated interviews of the presidential candidates. Readers can submit questions in a discussion thread, which can then be voted up or down or responded to. They’ve been taking a 10Questions-style approach to interviewing the candidates for years, albeit all text-based questions, so we’re hoping for promising results. Eventually five questions will be submitted to the candidates — we’ll do our best to push the candidates to respond.

The Candidates on the Web

• Kids of my generation who were obsessed with the Christopher Reeve Superman movies were genuinely horrified by — yet strangely attracted to — the trio of fellow Kryptonites that arrived on Earth to wreak havoc at precisely the moment that Superman decided to become human forever. Anyway. They were led by the menacing General Zod (“Now, kneeeeel before Zod!”), and they scared our socks off. Now that Zod is running for president, we need Superman more than ever. That is, unless Christopher Walken can stop him.

In Case You Missed It…

As more candidates (ok, Barack Obama) make the transition from online activism and organizing to offline support, I’ve realized that I have no word to describe the convergence of political action on the web and in meatspace, so I’ve come up with a neologism: Onffline.

With Nevada, South Carolina and then the February 5 mega-primary states coming up soon, Micah Sifry looked for house parties, fundraisers, phone-banking, and other events within 100 miles of Las Vegas and Raleigh, and then turned his attention to the major cities in the big primary states. The bottom line? Obama’s supporters are blowing Clinton and Edwards away.

The political conventions are at the end of the summer, but if you’re a blogger seeking credentials, don’t forget to get your application in, Micah Sifry helpfully reminds us.

With more caucuses and primaries approaching, Barack Obama’s campaign accidentally placed an ad for Nevada on a South Carolina TV news website. This seems to be an isolated incident. Fortunately, Alan Rosenblatt writes, online ads can be swapped or pulled in ways that print ads cannot. The ad is no longer displayed on the News 14 website.

DailyKos | General Zod | Hucksarmy.com | Mitt Romney | Richard Viguerie | Ron Paul | Slashdot
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