The Web on the Candidates

• Danger, John McCain!: Whether they know it our not, the McCain campaign has wandered into that dangerous place where the narrative about their candidate has been written and now we're all busily fleshing out the details. We're talking about the "John McCain is a technical moron" meme that has been floating around the last few months. Reactions to BarackBook.com, the RNC-created site that plays off of Facebook to give Barack Obama a hard time about his supposed circle of friends, has been pretty positive. Patrick Ruffini likes it, as does Mike Turk. Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland calls it "shockingly clever." But when the New Republic's Christopher Orr mistakenly reported that the site's open discussion boards were inundated with negative comments (a sample: "They can't do a McCainbook -- he'd forget his password") the reaction was predictable -- yet another McCainiac screw up on the Interwebs! Those harsh comments, though weren't front-and-center on the GOP-hosted site, though. They were on Facebook itself, on the apps page for BarackBook. Not nearly as criminal a web offense, but the episode was enough to reinforce the campaign's blundering online rep. #

• MoveOn -- Movement or Marketing Machine?: It's the latter, argues the Center for Media and Democracy's John Stauber. John has some polite things to say about MoveOn's successes, but, he says, in the 2008 election cycle "their limitations are becoming more and more glaring." The argument -- advanced by others before John, to be sure -- is that MoveOn is a top-down organization that presents itself as a bottom-up grassroots movement; its oft-noted 3.2 million strong membership really represents everyone whose name is on a MoveOn emailing list. But, and here we pick up John's argument again, what MoveOn has gotten right should be co-opted stat, and used to create a movement that has its members in the driver's seat. #

• "The Commander-in-Chief Test": A biting new anti-McCain video spot from the team behind the "Baracky" and "The Empire Strikes Barack" buzzed about the Internet yesterday, garnering more than a hundred thousand views. With those first two clips were total Obama hagiography, this one goes after McCain by documenting some of his less than shining moments in front of a camera. An Edward R. Murrow quote used as a coda -- "The obscure we see eventually, the completely obvious takes longer" -- lends a little gravitas to the piece. #

The Candidates on the Web

• McCain Musters a Defense: "We spent three quarters of our time on telecommunications issues, because that's what was driving the economy,"" -- John McCain, finally standing up for his tech cred yesterday in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. (via Politico's Jonathan Martin). Listening to McCain in recent weeks, you get the feeling that he'd rather talk about birth control/Viagra parity than about emails or BlackBerrys. But the somewhat crazy thing is that, until know, he hasn't presented the most obvious defense: for a long long while, McCain headed up the Senate committee that has a great deal of jurisdiction over the Internet, e-commerce, telecom companies, and on and on. We're not here to offer campaign advice, but when asked "what the heck do you know about technology?," isn't that record a better response than one that implies that he appreciates the need to take time out of campaign chaos to sit down with the Video Professor? #

• We Blame Joe Trippi: Campaign managers are the latest YouTube stars, reports the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas. Now, why in the world would anyone want to spend precious minutes watching video of Obama's David Plouffe or McCain's Rick Davis plot campaign strategy? The appeal, Jose notes, seems to be that hearing first-hand from the supposed gurus driving the campaign trains makes people feel like they're part of the effort. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• SecretarysBlog.HHS.GOV: Former Utah governor Michael Leavitt, now head of the Department of Health and Human Services, reflected yesterday upon his first year as a blogger. Leavitt gets at least one thing right: he writes his own posts. #

In Case You Missed It...

In a post called "Paradigm Shiftlessness," Luigi Montanez presents a case for the idea that where 2004 represented a revolution in Internet politics, 2008 is all about honing. #

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