The Web on the Candidates

• Finally! Like Iowa and New Hampshire, Super Tuesday felt like it would never come. And like Iowa and NH, it once seemed that tomorrow would be the day the Democratic and Republican nominations were firmed up. While that may be the case for the Republicans, it’s an amazingly tight right for the Democrats (cue the Super Bowl metaphors). Some polls are showing Barack Obama in a dead heat with, or ahead of, Hillary Clinton in California and other big states. Will Obama be the Eli Manning to Clinton’s Tom Brady? Or wait, is that Tom Brady to Clinton’s Eli Manning…?

• Is Barack Obama “Dean on steroids”? Andrew Gumbel, in a fascinating piece on Off The Bus, quotes one former Howard Dean supporter who thinks so, thanks to Obama’s unconventional campaign strategies like a reliance on field operations and the web (in addition to more traditional things like massive fundraising numbers and endorsements). But a candidate adopting the “reformist model” of campaigning — think Adlai Stevenson, Gary Hart, and Bill Bradley — has never made it this far into the nomination process. So Obama’s campaign — with tons of money, online support, and momentum going into Super Tuesday — is in uncharted waters. “In other words, there are no precedents for knowing what might happen,” writes Gumbel.

• Gumbel’s piece is one of many produced by Off the Bus as their volunteer reporters fan out across the country to cover tomorrow’s primaries (including a report from techPresident’s Allison Fine). They’re also producing neat audio slide shows, like this one from Joshua Cinelli about voters in Atlantic City. Off the Bus was made for this — do check out their excellent coverage.

• From the annals of irrelevance comes this unperceptive non-fact: Obama is a Mac and Clinton is a PC. We know this because Obama’s website looks like it was designed by the Apple team and Clinton’s is all blue lines and corporate-looking. To extend the metaphor, the New York Times’ Noam Cohen compares the Democratic campaign — which is about, oh, running the USA — to the Mac vs. PC ads starring a pudgy John Hodgeman and the hipster Justin Long, writing that “While Apple’s ad campaign maligns the PC by using an annoying man in a plain suit as its personification, it is not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics.” Hear that, David Axelrod? Stop dressing Obama in those Jobs-esque black turtlenecks and John Lennon glasses! It ain’t working.

• Everyone’s talking about a new pro-Obama video produced by the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am and Jesse Dylan, son of Bob, starring folks like Common, John Legend, and, yes, Scarlett Johannson. Reprising the “Yes I Can” slogan that Obama himself picked up from Cesar Chavez, it’s been viewed almost 700,000 times on YouTube since it was posted two days ago. Jeff Jarvis is a bit cynical about the message: “To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time,” he wrote. It’s true that it features a non-specific message of uplift, but that emotional appeal has worked so far…

• Ever wondered what the heck a “super delegate” is? Google/Feedburner whiz Rick Klau can help, and has built a wiki listing the super delegates and encouraging voters to add information about them. He also made it possible to view them in a Google Earth layer, which, while probably superfluous, is awfully cool.

• A bit lower-fi than the stuff we report on here, but still fun, is the New York Times’ Polling Place Photo Project. As its name implies, the project is comprised of voter-submitted photos of polling places around the country. I’ve always loved the way signs and people sprout up around polling places on voting days, and the PPPP is testament to the importance of our quaint little tradition. If you want to participate, go here to post your photos.

The Candidates on the Web

• Have we reached the ultimate moment in onffline activism? In a great piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, Jose Antonio Vargas talks to a bunch of high-level campaign staffers, including Peter Daou from the Clinton campaign, Christian Ferry of the John McCain campaign, and Mindy Finn from the Mitt Romney campaign, about the role online campaigning plays at this late stage. “Ultimately, our online popularity comes down to Mitt Romney himself,” Finn told Vargas. “The tools are there. We’ve built what we can. It’s up to him to excite voters.” Ferry gets to the heart of the matter: “It’s the question everyone always asks, right? ‘Can you actually use the Internet to deliver actual votes?’ Next Tuesday is a big voting day, so we’ll have to see.” We’re simply not doing justice to the piece in this short capsule; head over to the Post to read it for yourself.

• The Barack Obama juggernaut has broken fundraising records again, raising $32 million in January, with $28 million coming in from the web. Ninety percent of those donations were for $100 or less, with more than 10,000 peopek donating between $5 and $10 online. As several reporters have pointed out, Howard Dean only raised $27 million total in his campaign. Hillary Clinton hasn’t released her fundraising numbers (for good reason), and it’s assumed that her numbers won’t match Obama’s.

In Case You Missed It…

Over the past few months, we’ve gotten tantalizing hints of the level of integration of online and offline organizing that the Obama campaign has achieved, writes Colin Delany.

Steve Garfield will be covering tomorrow’s primary in Massachusetts a Nokia N95-3 cellphone to stream live over the AT&T 3G network using Qik, Mogulus and Seesmic.

Mike Connery live-blogged the “Closing Arguments,” the MySpace/MTV Super Dialogue featuring Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and Mike Huckabee. He suspects that Ron Paul supporters flooded the system, causing the online voting totals to suggest that online voters don’t want experience or change. They want Ron Paul.

It wasn’t a total surprise, but MoveOn members have voted to support Barack Obama in MoveOn’s endorsement primary.

Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | John McCain | Mitt Romney | Super Tuesday
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