Archive: Year: 2008

A month ago, Mitt Romney folded his presidential campaign, which won 11 states primaries and caucuses, 4.2 million votes and 291 delegates. He also raised $105 million, including $42 million of his own money. What follows is an interview with Mindy Finn, his Director of eStrategy. We're pleased that after a long hiatus away on the campaign scrum, this marks Mindy's return to the techPresident fold. Q: Mitt Romney launched his campaign on January 3, 2007...

The Web on the Candidates * The presidential campaign is everywhere, including on your mobile phone. Over at RingTones08, the most popular ringtones that people have downloaded (for free!) to their phones are excerpts from the Yes We Can Obama song/video, the hilarious "Baby Got Barack" rap, and a Ron Paul reggae tune. RingTones08 bills itself as the "only free site for posting and sharing ringtones about the US election," and its founders, Jo Lee and Katrin Verclas, have hit on a great way to engage activists and new voters alike. We've mentioned this project before, but the site is no longer in beta, and it now includes new features like an easier to use process for submitting tones. * If you're...

The Web on the Candidates * John Heileman interviews former Edwards strategist Joe Trippi by instant messenger (so says the headline) in New York Magazine, but oddly, neither of them :>) or ;>) during the whole chat. Trippi repeats his now well-noted observation that "the Clinton campaign is the last top-down campaign on our side," but also observes that no matter what the medium used, Obama could be doing better with blue-collar Democrats. * The netroots left keeps gnawing on itself as the Obama-Clinton contest plays out, with MyDD ur-blogger Jerome Armstrong mocking the enthusiasms of pro-Obama voices like OpenLeft's Chris Bowers, and it's getting more than a little nasty. Over at FireDoglake, which has stayed officially neutral in the nomination fight,...

Justine Lam, the internet director of the Ron Paul campaign, just gave a really interesting summary of how and why Ron Paul succeeded on- and off-line. I can't possibly live-blog every speaker or session at Politics Online, but here are my notes on her talk. These are close to accurate quotations but best to treat them as paraphrases. Three reasons for Paul's online success: 1. His message was unique to the Republican field, and tapped into various constituencies that were otherwise unaddressed, at least on the Republican side. Duh. 2. We decided early on not to create a central social network on the campaign site, but instead saw the site as a hub pointing to other networks. We tried to make clear that...

The amazingly productive e-democracy hackers at mySociety.org have rolled out their latest deviously simple web service, GroupsNearYou.com. As mySociety's founder Tom Steinberg explains, "There’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community. However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. As a consequence of not having one big simple place to go to find and join local groups (many of which are not even on the web for Google to find) far fewer...

Sometime today, I presume, the Obama campaign will reveal its total fundraising haul for the month of February, and everyone will go gaga. Whatever the actual number--$35 million is the low estimate (which would match the Clinton campaign's take), $70 million is Republican consultant and techPresident blogger Patrick Ruffini's plausible prediction (which would be nearly six times John McCain's reported February income)--it's important to put this into more dramatic perspective. In 2004, when the total US population was about 296 million, the total number of donors giving $200 or more to all federal campaigns and committees--that is, to all presidential and congressional candidates, PACs and party committees--was 1,140,535, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is, about .4% of...

The conference season is heating up, and while we're not at TED or BIL or FRED*, Andrew, Josh and I will be busy over the next few weeks. Here are some highlights: --March 4-5, Politics Online, Washington, DC: -Andrew and I are co-moderating a session on "Successful Organizing Using Social Media," and the speakers we're working with are first-rate: Ben Rattray, the CEO and founder of Change.org; Randall Winston, the director of non-profit relations for Project Agape and Facebook Causes; and Allison Fine, the author of "Momentum, Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age." -Josh is speaking on a panel on "Building Grassroots Momentum," along with Alex Hunsucker of Eventful, Amy Rubin of the DSCC and previously with the Edwards campaign; and...

Ralph Nader is announcing his Vice Presidential running mate today at noon, an unorthodox move to some, but required due to the onerous rules regarding petitioning for ballot access in many states. I predict he will pick former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel. I've heard that the two men have been talking, and not long ago the Gravel campaign sent its supporters an email containing a petition to start a joint ticket. Nader/Gravel will merge the walking id of 2008 (Gravel) with its superego (Nader). The results, if nothing else, are sure to be entertaining. The Nader campaign also says its first email fundraising campaign was a success; geared to raise $50,000 from 500 donors in honor of Nader's birthday yesterday, they say...

"Debates give candidates a chance to break loose of YouTube-ification and speak for themselves at length." So wrote New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley in her analysis of yesterday's presidential debate between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the 20th of the primary season. Well, I don't know if TV debates actually give the candidates a chance to speak for themselves at length, as opposed to giving TV personalities a platform to posture as journalists and try to play "gotcha." But that's not what bugs me about Stanley's assertion. It's her implicit conflation of YouTube with the sound-bitification of political coverage. Television is scarce media, and for decades the sound-bite has been shrinking. In the 1968 presidential election, the average network...

Noted conservative commentator William F. Buckley just passed away. Through the magic of YouTube, you can relive his most famous moment in the national limelight, when he debated liberal writer Gore Vidal on the merits of the anti-war protests during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. The video quality is lousy, but the sound is good enough for you to hear Vidal refer to Buckley as a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley to call Vidal a "queer" who should "stay plastered." Sort of puts today's slugfests on the cable chat shows in context, no?...