The Web on the Candidates

• There’s a lot of math involved in figuring out if Hillary Clinton can catch up to Barack Obama in the delegate race. Thankfully, Slate’s Chadwick Martin and Chris Wilson have launched Slate’s delegate calculator to help. It makes it really, really easy to figure out delegate counts based on vote percentages. So in the runup to March 4, use it to make your predictions, and keep it handy on primary night.

• Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films spent the first part of the cycle attacking Rudy Giuliani, but with a page devoted to John McCain, they're marshaling their resources against the presumptive nominee. Their most recent creation: mccainsings.com, a site featuring a scathing remix of McCain’s “bomb bomb bomb Iran” bit and advertising a CD of the song for the low cost of $1,000,000,000,000.95 (you'll probably get the reference).

• Glassbooth, one of the many sites that quizzes voters on their political preferences and pairs them with a candidate, just launched a Facebook application. While the best of these quizzes offer surprising results, there are basically two Democrats — with virtually identical policies — and one Republican (sorry, Huck) to throw your support behind It'll be hard to surprise anyone at this point.

• Another Friday, another campaign web art project, this one focused on John McCain. Like Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle and Hillary Is Mom Jeans, John McCain Is Your Jalopy consists solely of one quasi-absurd phrase on a web page that changes as you click. The phrases — “John McCain thinks you need a haircut, hippy”; “John McCain has a full bowl of Werther’s Original” — poke fun at McCain’s age and perceived stiffness, a bit unfairly. But it's supposed to be funny, and the Werther’s Original bit, which puts good ol’ Wilford Brimley in mind, is pretty good.

The Candidates on the Web

• Barack Obama's campaign has been helped by thousands of volunteers who, with little or no guidance from the campaign, have been organizing voters and getting out the vote, writes the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Cooper. He tells the story of Obama volunteer Ian Davis, who was organizing on the ground in Texas for months before the Obama campaign got there, using tools available on the Obama website. “When Sen. Obama’s team finally arrived, Mr. Davis handed over laundry baskets stuffed with 20,000 handwritten names of potential volunteers, which Mr. Davis had gathered on his own,” Cooper writes. The story makes it clear that the relationship between campaign and voter -- enabled by online tools -- is murkier than ever before. (Thanks, Nancy!)

• Mike Gravel is threatening to sue a pro-Clinton 527 called the American Leadership Project for producing an online ad that, the campaign claims, would break the law if it made the jump to TV, since it explicitly advocates for a particular candidate. It’s a reminder that Gravel is still in the race, though does he really have much to gain from this kind of lawsuit? (Here’s more from Ben Smith about the American Leadership Project).

In Case You Missed It…

In our favorite videos of the week, Mike Huckabee continues to hang in there, and YouTube nation is behind him. A video from a family of Huck supporters is possibly the most wholesome thing we’ve ever seen on YouTube. Also, new videos for Barack Obama continue to break musical boundaries (sort of), a robot voices its anger at Ralph Nader, and the metal/rap/punk crowd still adores Ron Paul. Boo-yah!

Micah Sifry rounds up the techPresident team’s upcoming appearances at conferences across the country, including next week’s Politics Online — today’s the last day to buy your tickets online, so get moving!

As we get closer to the Ohio and Texas primaries, offline polls are showing Barack Obama moving to a tie with Hillary Clinton in Texas, and within six or seven points of her in Ohio. But the online action in those states paints a very different, and more complex, picture.

Mike Turk clarifies a quote of his from the Washington Post, writing that there does not appear to be any effort to convert that excitement and energy into actual votes. Most of the GOTV work being done is still being done offline, and what little is being done online seems to be badly marketed and ill-conceived.

Blackroots activists are taking on the Congressional Black Caucus again, urging the superdelegates to represent their constituents by backing Barack Obama, reports Ari Melber

Barack Obama | Glassbooth | Hillary Clinton | John McCain | Mike Gravel
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