To the outside observer, France's 2007 race for president has a lot in common with the 2008 race in the U.S.

Like in the U.S., it's wide open: for the first time since 1974, no candidate is an incumbent prime minister or president. Like in the U.S., this is the first time a woman – and a highly polarizing one – is a credible candidate. Like in the U.S., the stakes are very high because many hope that the election will help solve a deeply traumatic issue, Iraq for the U.S., and the welfare state in France.

Of course, like in the U.S., the candidates are desperately trying to use the internet to their advantage. And like in the U.S., even though they seem to think it's important, they also seem to be stumbling in the dark, spending lots of money to leverage the power of the new media without really understanding its nature. This is why the candidates' efforts are interesting, and maybe yield lessons for U.S. campaign watchers.

Sarko

Nicolas Sarkozy, or "Sarko" as he is known, is the mainstream right wing's candidate. He has revamped his image after a dip in the polls due to a hard-charging anti-crime rhetoric that many saw as excessive, and is now the clear front-runner. This is not necessarily a good thing: in the past two election cycles the frontrunners were shot down in upsets. But he's still the bookies' favorite.

The Sarko Show, now online

Many have said that Sarko's campaign is all about excess and glitz, and that's a valid point. There's definitely a part of him that thinks "bigger is better", and it shows when you visit his campaign website, sarkozy.fr .

The website's main feature — basically, its only feature — is video. Click on the NSTV tab (the other, plentiful tabs are irrelevant, they take you to various sections of NSTV) and you will realize that NSTV is huge, with many channels. For instance, "Day to Day" (Au jour le jour) features scenes from the campaign. It's updated daily or even several times a day. Another channel focuses on endorsements, another on speeches, etc.

Overall, the site is impressive. Sarko clearly has pulled no stops. But once you're done watching the videos (and, given the sheer number, a surprising amount are actually worth watching), your hunger isn't quite sated.

There's nothing to do, here. Interaction on the site is token. Sarkozy.fr has no way to get its viewers to connect, with the campaign or with each other. A common charge against Sarko is his arrogance, and this is an example of it. "Watch me! Watch how good I am!" And it's fun for a while, because he is good, but there's not much else to do.

To be fair, the campaign does have another website, debat-sarkozy.fr (Sarkozy Debate), where people can start threads, ask questions and have them answered by the campaign team. But the site is small and cheap, and it's no coincidence it's apart from the main campaign website. Sarko's presence on his own website is so overbearing, he pushed the voters out.

Debat-sarkozy.fr also takes you to a page that lists all the social networking sites that Sarkozy's on, but without discriminating between those that are important and those that I've never heard of. It's pretty obvious the Sarkozy team doesn't care about social networking and is only on it because it's hip.

Look familiar ?

Sarkozy's website reflects his public persona — good and bad — surprisingly well. All of Sarko's bombast is there, and it's a good thing, because you need that in a campaign, but it's hard to identify with a slick website that doesn't seem to give a damn who you are or what you have to say.

Where most sites have a form for people to enter their email, there is a countdown to the election – clearly the only thing on his mind.

Ségo

There's an obvious parallel to be made between Ségolène Royal, or "Ségo," and a U.S. Democtratic candidate for President. After all she's a woman, she came to political prominence on the heels of her husband's career as a party heavyweight, and she has been known to triangulate adversaries by tacking right on certain issues.

Of course, the Democratic candidate I'm comparing her to is… Barack Obama. Watching Ségo's meteoric, inexplicable rise had a lot more to do with Obamania than with the meticulous progress of the junior Senator from New York. They're both newcomers to the national stage with microscopic records, both talk hot air about changing politics but are suspiciously light on the issues. Most importantly, both owe their rise more to who they are than to what they've accomplished: Barack's race as well as Ségo's gender make them symbols.

So, does Ségo's campaign have lessons to teach U.S. Obama watchers? Well, her offline campaign has been a disaster, with poll numbers to match. But her online campaign is pretty impressive.

The new politics she preaches draws heavily on the concept of participatory democracy, which has led her to embrace the internet. Her opinions are the people's opinions, she has said. And the best way to collect them is online.

Plus, since she ran as an insurgent in the primary, the internet was a good way to short-circuit the party hierarchy and connect with voters. Hence the creation of Desires of a Future (Désirs d'avenir), the name of her website and campaign committee. Issues were opened for debate, pseudonymous web surfers posted their opinions, and later a Ségo staffer would post a "synthesis" of what had been written. Those syntheses are meant to be the basis for her policy agenda. More importantly, regional and local "Desires of a Future Committees" were set up by supporters, connecting through the web and working at the grassroots level. And since winning the nomination, her operation has fleshed out.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: her website is really ugly. It just is. Ugly colors, ugly design, you name it. It's like a cross between a daycare's website and a webpage from 1999.

Let's party like it's 1999

Ok. But the features are there. First of all, her website is the only campaign website with a splash page that asks for your email and post code before you can access the main site. The obligatory splash image is a picture taken by a supporter.

More importantly, it's hard not to notice that the website is abuzz with discussion. One of the top links on the sidebar is "Forums", which takes you to the webpage's 100 (!) bulletin boards, one board per issue. And they're active.

As you scroll further down, you have the e-activists (e-militants) section. Yes, that is a stupid name.

One much talked-about feature of the campaign is that Ségo asks her activists to scour the web for blogs are critical of her, and respond to them. This is not a smart move. It betrays the politico idea that the web is a bad force that must be controlled ; it has also attracted the ire of most political bloggers, who end up spammed by commenters pasting a sales pitch that has often little to do with the original post. But the idea to ask people to participate to the campaign online is there.

So called e-creators (e-créateurs) actually create content that is used by the campaign, from photos and videos, to art that illustrates campaign material, etc. It would be best if, instead of having people email submissions to the campaign team in a top-down way, they would let everyone vote on them, but it's still further than any campaign I know of has been in leveraging its online impact.

Another impressive thing is this section, which uses Google Maps to show all the grassroots events that are taking place all over the country. Again, I don't know many campaigns that show such an understanding of how to use the web's features and how to bring people in the campaign by encouraging them to work from the bottom up.

The Blog section is very interesting. Ségoléne has eschewed the idea of most U.S. candidates, which is to have people create their blog trough their campaign website. Instead, the Create your Blog (Créer son blog) link takes you to an page that explains how to quickly set up a blog with a free service. I think this is very smart: instead of asking people to come to her website and stay there when they already have a thousand subscriptions to social networks, she takes the fight to the streets and pushes her supporters to blog out in the open. A news feed in the blog section shows what's new, and people can vote on what blogs are most interesting. The top 5 most interesting blogs are linked to from a sidebar.

A neat section is Segoland, where you can download a cool PDF showing each blog by geographic location, with the links between them. In my wet dreams, instead of a PDF you would have a frequently updated, interactive Flash-type thingy, but again, this is the furthest that most campaigns have gone in showing understanding of how the web works.

To sum up

To sum up, while Sarko is impressive and glitzy, he clearly doesn't "get it," Ségo is leaps and bounds ahead of him.

But one has to wonder: if the internet has such potential to change democracy, then how come Ségo has such an effective online operation — and her campaign is going so badly? Shouldn't her online buzz be enough to carry her all the way?

Well, your 14 year old cousin Kenny who can only play the first riffs of Stairway to Heaven, given a top of the line guitar, is still your 14 year old cousin Kenny. Since before her nomination, Ségo has piled gaffe after gaffe after gaffe, and that sort of incompetence can be fixed by no campaign operation, online or off.

But I think there's more to it than just Ségo's ineptness. First of all, the internet is less widespread in France than in the U.S. When you campaign online, you are mostly reaching out to a subset of the population, likely to be more educated and more affluent than the average voter, so you have less of an impact. Secondly, I think it's hard to overplay the part that money plays in U.S. campaigns. The internet is so powerful in the U.S. because if you play your cards right, you can raise tons of it. In France, that factor is mostly out of the picture.

So what's left of the internet's role in the campaign is basically Lee Atwater's wet dream. Videos of candidates' gaffes pop up online, and are replayed on TV. Meanwhile, candidates invest in the web, partly because it's the thing to do, partly because the others are doing it and they don't want to be left behind, but not because they think it has the potential to change politics, or even make that much of a difference in the outcome of the election.

Whether or not they're right, I think, is yet to be decided.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is the secretary general of Impulsion Concorde, France's premier right of center think tank for students and young professionals. He is also the editor of its influential blog, impulsionleblog.com. He lives in Paris, where he attends law school at Pantheon Assas University.