The Web on the Candidates

• The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath — one of the finest chroniclers of 21st century minutiae — uncovers a wonderful site called I Dream of Hillary … I Dream of Barack that collects stories of presidential campaign stops to our collective unconscious. Site creator Sheila Heti — a Canadian! — calls it “the world’s first metaphysical poll on the Democratic contenders.” See McGrath’s writeup for some details about peoples’ dreams (here’s a teaser: “Hillary Clinton came to my apartment, smoked a bowl with me and a couple friends, then she gave me an iPhone”). Meanwhile, Heti has started collecting recollections of John McCain. Not sure if McCain will be breaking out the iPhones or the, er, illicit substances in those.

• A month before the Pennsylvania primary, some online indicators of enthusiasm there are showing Barack Obama losing attention and a rise for Hillary Clinton. Google Trends shows that, starting around March 3, the number of searches for Clinton beat out those for Obama for the first time in a month.

  

  Similarly, Yahoo!’s buzz stats show that while more people in PA are still searching for Obama, his lead is dropping and Hillary is gaining ground.

  

  Obama still blows all the other candidates away in terms of YouTube views, Facebook supporters, etc.

  In offline polls, RealClearPolitics shows Clinton leading Obama by about 12 points.

  Keep an eye on this stuff — as we always say, this kind of data doesn’t predict anything, but is a good indicator of voter enthusiasm.

• Larry David’s (yes, that Larry David) screed about Hillary Clinton’s “red telephone” ad has been getting play across the web. His point? How has Clinton, with all of her “Sybillish personalities that have surfaced during the campaign,” become “the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama?” Just before he posts a montage of 32 of Clinton’s scariest faces, David suggests that she “needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away from things for a while, a nice beach somewhere — somewhere far away, where there are…no phones.”

• We were at the Politics Online conference this week, and were sorry to miss a Nation-sponsored panel on How the Netroots are Changing Politics, with participants including techPresident’s own Ari Melber and Zephyr Teachout. But all is not lost: Nancy Scola wrote up some notes about the event, which make it obvious that we missed a great night.

The Candidates on the Web

• Barack Obama has finally released his fundraising numbers for February (remember those halcyon days when candidates only released this data once every three months?), and coming in at a cool $55 million, they’re predictably impressive. While that number is $20 million more than Hillary Clinton’s $35 million haul (and bit lower than Patrick Ruffini's prediction), both candidates are scaling new heights, bringing in the majority of their money over the Internet.

In Case You Missed It…

Through the tools that the Obama campaign has deployed and the choices they have made, writes California VogerConnect's Dan Ancona, they are deliberately and methodically building out this next version of our democracy - and nowhere have they done this more so than in California.

We faithfully bring you our favorite political videos of the week. From John McCain’s continuing slide into artful weirdness to the Clinton/Obama “red telephone” ads, we’re wondering if humor and humanity are getting lost in the mix. Thankfully, Jack Nicholson’s there to bail us out. Meanwhile, Ron Paul may be telling supporters he’s out, though we couldn’t follow his speech enough to know exactly what he was communicating.

A while back Valdis Krebs blogged about the social network strategy of the Huckabee campaign and how it was accomplishing a lot with very little (money). Now he returns to discuss how, with insular cliques, your strategy may work, but it only goes so far — influence does not cross the chasm to other groups.

When it comes to social media, Fred Stutzman is a digital native. The fact that he’s a native makes him well-suited to explain the technology and its uses and benefit; the cost, of course, is losing the non-native perspective.

Nancy Scola piggybacks off Michael Whitney’s news of Facebook’s decision to swap political identities for party labels, and writes that it’s strange and misguided choice for the social networking site.

Barack Obama | Dreams | Hillary Clinton | Larry David | Pennsylvania
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