The Web on the Candidates
With John McCain formally announcing his candidacy for president yesterday (and making news by duking it out with Jon Stewart AND calling for Alberto Gonzalez to resign), and Rudy Giuliani still making waves with his blunt charge that if a Democrat is elected, more Americans will die from terror attacks on home soil, the trend in the blogosphere has tipped–perhaps for the first time this year–to the Republicans. There were close to 2000 blog posts mentioning McCain or Giuliani in the past day, compared to fewer than 1000 for the three Democratic frontrunners, according to Technorati’s tracking tools. A lot of the blog references appear negative, however, like this attack on Giuliani over his references to 9-11.
The DNC and RNC appear to be taking diametrically different approaches to yesterday’s bipartisan call, led by Stanford law prof Larry Lessig, to put presidential debate footage on YouTube where voters will be able to continue the debate and hold them accountable for their answers. CNET News.com reported that “A representative from the RNC stated on Wednesday afternoon that the committee is ‘not going to get involved in this issue.'” Meanwhile, Lessig confirmed to CNET News.com that he had been in talks with the DNC, but no details on the nature of those talks had been provided. DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton later added: “We are already exploring ways to make the DNC-sanctioned debates more accessible and will continue to work on this and other issues in our discussions with the networks.”
The Candidates on the Web
YouTube is giving John McCain his week in the Spotlight, and he’s put up a video that asks viewers to tell him where they’re not hearing “straight talk” on an important issue. Unfortunately for him, the first video response on the site is from PrezVid’s Jeff Jarvis, which he posted weeks ago and where he points out that no one had ever responded to McCain’s original plea to visitors to his website that they post questions to him on YouTube. Maybe this time things will go better.
With another Democratic debate happening tonight in South Carolina, some of the Democrats are making an online push to get supporters to house parties to watch the event. We thought it would be interesting to see if they have anything going in South Carolina itself. Searching within a hundred mile radius of the state capitol, Columbia, we found two debate watch parties organized by supporters of Hillary Clinton; two organized by supporters of Barack Obama; and one by John Edwards supporters (though his campaign is also busing volunteers to the debate site itself). One side-note: Edwards’s site allows you to see all the upcoming events his supporters are organizing in one global view; it’s a smart way to show his base how active they are, instead of compartmentalizing them by zipcode.
In Case You Missed It:
Jack McEnany says online presidential debates could “breathe relevancy into a tired format.”
David All reviews the launch of John McCain’s official blog.
Steve Garfield shines some light on Andy Carvin’s ideas on “How Public Broadcasting Can Make a Real Different in 2008.”
Spencer Overton argues that detailed candidate platforms on websites may be a thing of the past, and in the future candidates will “build the network that allows people to work together to solve an array of the nation’s detailed problems.