The Web on the Candidates

• Ronulans across the country are facing a quandary. Should they vote for John McCain this November or stay true to his Paulness by writing him in? Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland wanted to find out what happened to “this rolling fireball of energy and enthusiasm” that the Paulites brought to the table, and polled them about their November plans. More than 2,000 Ronstars have taken her poll thus far, and a whopping 47% say they’ll be writing in Ron Paul. Only 7% will vote for John McCain, and 6% are sitting the thing out completely. Most surprisingly, 24% say they will vote for Barack Obama. Although, like Paul, Obama opposed the war in Iraq, he also espouses many of the big-government policies that sent folks running to Paul in the first place. Contradictions: the breakfast of champions.

• Taking a cue from the Surrender Hillary site, Colorado progressive site ProgressNowAction is encouraging readers to post their own clever captions to a bunch of Photoshopped anti-McCain images. It’s almost as fun as Mitt Romney’s old robo-call tool.

• We’ve linked to Rosemary Watson’s Hillary Clinton impressions — which she features on her ThatHillaryShow YouTube channel — before, but this is hands-down the best Hillary impression we’ve ever seen. SNL, here’s your Amy Poehler replacement.

• Despite the fact that the Obama campaign is hiring in-house online adspeople, analysts are still projecting that most campaign ad funds will be spent offline. In her new white paper, Politics ‘08 Online: Push Meets Pull (price: $695!), Lisa E. Phillips predicts that “Over the course of the year, less than 2% of political ad budgets will be spent online.” Meawhile, 50% to 80% will be spent on something called “television,” which is apparently some sort of glass box featured in nursing homes and Pep Boys franchises across the country.

• Spelers unight! Having taken a look at Google Adwords search trends, Spot-on’s Scott Olin Schmidt made a surprising discovery:

  In Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than two-thousand people per day misspelled Hillary Clinton’s name; In Indiana and North Carolina, one out of six searches for Hillary Clinton have just one “L” in her first name. Another five percent are looking for Hillary Rodman Clinton, who apparently served eight years First Lady of the NBA Bad Boys Club.

  And even if you spelled Hillary’s name right, Google doesn’t tell you much. Schmidt sees the future in contextual advertising, which, he says, both Obama and Clinton are owning at the moment.

The Candidates on the Web

• The Politico’s Ben Smith reports that the Obama campaign is “steering the candidate’s wealthy supporters away from independent Democratic groups,” i.e., 527s that could help frame the message for the Democrats in the general election, and toward the campaign itself. There’s been lots of speculation on campaign’s intentions. The move may be directed at certain media-centric 527s like David Brock’s Media Matters and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress that could be perceived as too close to Hillary Clinton. It’s unlikely that the Obama campaign wants to cut off all third-party funders, and is trying to control its message as tightly as possible. Last week Matt Stoller enumerated the ways Obama has built a parallel Democratic infrastructure; whatever the motives, this looks like one more step in that direction.

• We recently got an alert from the Frank Lautenberg Senate campaign announcing the creation of an “Action Center” on their website, but were disappointed to see that it’s the same web 1.0 approach: tell-a-friend, sign-a-petition, make-a-donation (while we collect your email addresses). You’d think that in the wake of Obama’s impressive online organizing that more state-level campaigns would be looking at emulating his approach with my.barackobama.com.

• Earlier this week Ralph Nader showed up at the Google offices to talk about his presidential campaign. About 5 minutes in, he says the Internet has been a "disappointment," and then, "don't get me going on the Internet." He goes on to say that "it hasn't shown much by way of mobilizing, except on Internet issues..." Keep watching; it gets worse. We're perplexed as to why Nader bothered to go to Google, as he seems to have no idea what it is or represents.

• This just in: TechCrunch is reporting that Al Gore's CurrentTV tried to buy Digg in 2006, offering at least $100 million for it. Too bad he never got the chance to day, "I invented crowd-sourced URL bookmarking."

In Case You Missed It…

Based on a few recent experiences regarding the YouTube community, and specifically how the tool could help increase citizen participation in our upcoming general election debates, David All seeks to encourage the Commission on Presidential Debates — the Old Guards if you will — to truly embrace the Internet in at least one of its three scheduled debates.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain continue to hit up supporters for cash via e-mail, but Obama for America is going one step further, reports Kate Kaye. The Senator’s campaign is asking diehards via e-mail to trek to Oregon and knock on doors. The grassroots-minded campaign also used e-mail to push for residents of Obama’s home state of Illinois to get out Tuesday’s Indiana vote, in-person.

Micah Sifry offers a peek at the emerging program for this year’s fifth annual Personal Democracy Forum, which is coming up this June 23-24 in New York City. We’re pretty excited about the line-up that’s taking shape (and the fact that this is the first year we’re expanding to two days). Plus we think that this year’s event is going to be a seminal moment in defining the Internet’s impact in opening up not only politics, but also governance (i.e., all the important stuff that happens after the election is over).

Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | Ron Paul
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