The Web on the Candidates

• The Huffington Post continues to break campaign news. Late last week Celeste Fremon wrote about comments made by Hillary Clinton at a post-Super Tuesday fundraiser in which she blamed MoveOn and the “activist base” of the Democratic Party for her primary and caucus losses. But OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller isn’t upset. “I love that Clinton is granting so much credit to Moveon and the activist base, explicitly saying that we are why she is losing. That’s a concession towards our political power that I wouldn’t expect, and it’s welcome,” he writes. Despite the remarks, Clinton did appear at YearlyKos last summer, and Internet Director Peter Daou diligently blogs at DailyKos and other progressive sites. In any case, while this may have been a message tailor-made for Clinton donors (not unlike Obama’s “bitter” comments behind closed doors in San Francisco), but it certainly wont endear her to a group that’s already skeptical of her candidacy.

• TechPresident’s David All is the latest to approach the question of why conservatives fall behind the left on the web. Likely reacting to the failure of Freedoms Watch to replicate MoveOn’s fundraising success, All details some reasons why MoveOn has become such a force in progressive American politics. In doing so he links to another post from Jon Henke, another smart conservative strategist, about why MoveOn works. Henke is less optimistic than All, writing that “the Right just doesn’t understand why the Left has been successful at this, so they’re throwing their resources at misguided projects.” This is great reading if you’re trying to understand why the conservative MoveOn has yet to appear, and what the right is doing to change that.

• A forward-thinking website and custom-built social network have done wonders for the Obama campaign, but, as Newhouse News Service’s Jonathan Tilove writes, giving journalists and opposition groups access to much of campaign’s strategizing can be a dangerous game. He focuses on my.barackobama.com, or MyBO, which is the center of voter-generated activity on the Obama site. There are lots of examples of intelligent and asinine conversations on the site, though it’s a mistake to connect those to the campaign. With freedom comes responsibility, or the chance to call someone a jackass.

• Social networking power alert: the Facebook group Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary) has reached, um, one million strong. It happened on April 18th, and the group’s new goal is 1,250,000 members by August 25th. It’s unclear if members tend to be Obama fans or Republicans, but they are united in their against-ness. Meanwhile, the Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) is only half the way there, with 519,000 members.

• This is probably the scariest thing we’ve seen this year: webcam software Fix8, which lets IM chatters animate themselves using creepy avatars, has launched a series of political avatars that give voters a chance to create their own debate starring Barack, Hillary, John, and even Wolf. Watch the video to see it in action, but beware of nightmares induced by the Conan O’Brien-style moving mouths.

The Candidates on the Web

• Time magazine’s Michael Scherer and Jay Newton-Small are the most recent journalists to describe how for millions of voters, “the Internet has turned presidential politics into a fully interactive event.” Specifically, they look at why the Democrats have used the web more successfully than the GOP — using, of course, Obama’s web team as a prime example. There are many reasons for the left’s online dominance, including the McCain campaigns’ own neglect of the social elements of the web, which often lead to the holy grail of onffline action, fundraising. But toward the end Scherer and Newton-Small give the simplest, and probably the most accurate, explanation: “McCain has yet to excite the same level of grass-roots activity that Democrats are exhibiting.”

In Case You Missed It…

Political campaigns should digitally record everything, to their peril or advantage, argues Michael Tate.

Think Wednesday’s ABC debate hurt Obama’s chance in next week’s Pennsylvania primary? New Yahoo Buzz data and recent offline polls might cause you to think again.

Last week NPR launched their new Sunday Soapbox feature, in which a trio of bloggers will be writing about the election and posting audio podcasts of their commentary. Take a listen: TechPresident’s Mindy Finn *and *Joshua Levy are two of those three bloggers/podcasters.

Barack Obama | Facebook | Hillary Clinton | John McCain | MoveOn
Joshua Levy's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati