The Web on the Candidates

• Political ad watch site WIT Ad Blog picked up on a curious discrepancy among recent Hillary Clinton ads running on a handful of news web sites. A Flash ad appearing in The New York Post and whitepages.com asked supporters to donate $50; virtually the same ad, running on denverpost.com, jsonline.com (Milwaukee), columbusdispatch.com, and indystar.com, asked supporters for only $5. What gives? Was the campaign just targeting certain markets based on demographic information, or is something else at play?

• Days before the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama’s site was hacked, reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jordan Robertson. Visitors to “the community blogs section” of the site — presumably my.barackobama.com — were redirected to Hillary Clinton’s site. The hack was “appears to have been a prank,” though what hack isn’t? In any case, it didn’t cause any damage and the Obama site was soon secured. Network on, Obama people.

• Like many of the web-obsessed, I love the The Fail Blog. Every day brings a fresh failure, usually of huge, embarrassing proportions. Rarely do politics enter the fail-fray (what, do politicians never fail?), but today that changed:

  

The Candidates on the Web

• The Philadelphia Inquirer is the latest print newspaper to discover that the internet has been a central part of presidential campaigns for, oh, about five years. Writer Frank Visco does uncover the cute story of of eight-year-old Simon Shankweiler, who has used YouTube, button and t-shirt sales, and a lemonade stand to raise $940 for the Obama campaign. And there are quotes aplenty from former John Edwards advisor Joe Trippi and NDN’s Simon Rosenberg, both of whom take shots at the Clinton campaign. “The Clinton campaign never really believed it was a partnership until recently,” Rosenberg told Visco. “It was all about her, not about us.” But, as Xavier Lopez-Ayala argues in techPresident today, the Clinton campaign has stepped up its game as of late.

In Case You Missed It…

Time to make room for a different point of view on Hillary Clinton’s use of the web: President of the Aquinas College HillBlazers chapter Xavier Lopez-Ayala writes that the prevailing narrative about the Clinton campaign is embodied in the phrase “top-down,” and there is some truth to that characterization. But if the Clinton campaign is so top-down, then shouldn’t the coverage of the smallest concession of “total control” be lauded by the folks over at TechPresident (us!) as movement in the right direction, and more openness encouraged? He would answer in the affirmative, but, largely, he writes, the coverage remains negative, at worst, critical at best.

Earlier this week Barack Obama was asked to comment on Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas. “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?,” Obama responded. Mike Turk thinks John McCain missed an opportunity to capitalize on the quote and offers five suggestions for how his campaign should use the web to turn the comment back on Obama.

Barack Obama | Fail Blog | Hillary Clinton | John McCain
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