Archive: Category: TechPresident

Jonathan Alter has a fun scoop in Newsweek: a rare interview with Ross Perot, America's most reclusive political figure. Three things jumped out at me in the interview, which was mainly about Perot's dislike of John McCain: 1. The tiny Texan is still incredibly obsessed with the cause of America's Vietnam POWs, and his belief that we left men behind there. Back in 1992, I worked with Thomas Ferguson on a long investigative piece he wrote for The Nation called "The Lost Crusade of Ross Perot" (which unfortunately isn't available online). It's a long trip down thru the looking glass, if you want to understand Perot's deep dislike of people like McCain and the Bush family, but it's all bound up...

Time for another periodic look at grassroots activity being generated by the top Democratic campaigns, which give their supporters online tools to organize and advertise local house parties, fundraisers, phone-banking and the like. With Nevada, South Carolina and then the February 5 mega-primary states coming up soon, I looked for events within 100 miles of Las Vegas and Raleigh, and then turned my attention to the major cities in the big primary states. The bottom line? Obama's supporters are blowing Clinton and Edwards away. Location Clinton Obama Edwards Las Vegas, 89110 1 8 0 Raleigh, 27601 1 6 0 San Diego, 92122 6 55 30 Los Angeles, 90012 8 170 0 San Francisco, 94101 9 189 29 Phoenix, 85014 1 5 0 Denver, 80201 16 87 12 Atlanta, 30301 20 37 3 Little Rock, 72201 4 7 0 Chicago, 60601 3 43 5 Cambridge, 02138 16 52 3 Minneapolis, 55401 5 37 3 St. Louis, 63101 4 28 4 New York, 10011 13 292 0 Here's a look at Obama's event map for the San Francisco area:...

If you're a blogger, it's not too late to apply for credentials to attend the Democratic convention in Denver, Jason Rosenberg tells me. Rosenberg is the convention's online director, and he called me yesterday to make sure techPresident got its application in. (The deadline is April 15.) The DNCC will be credentialing one blogger from every state and territory (56 in all), as well as an undetermined number of national bloggers. "We're looking for people with political impact," Rosenberg says, adding that bloggers have to demonstrate that by listing their Technorati rank, including at least five links to political posts they've written. Only bloggers who have been active for at least six months and have written at least 120 political posts...

Before I started writing about the intersection of technology and politics, I spent many years reporting on and analyzing the efforts of third-party and independent political candidates for office. Eventually that led to a book, "Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America", which was published in 2002, covering everything from the rise of Ross Perot and the election of Jesse Ventura to the Ralph Nader campaign of 2000 and the birth of NY's Working Families Party. I don't write as much about third parties anymore, for a couple of reasons. First, I think the main third parties in America today--the Greens and the Libertarians--are both far too ideological and inward-facing to be meaningful vehicles for change. Second, I think that,...

MoveOn.org Political Action and Catalist, a progressive voter file provider, have launched a new political application called "VotePoke" that is designed to help voters find out whether they, and their friends, are registered to vote. The first-of-its-kind site allows anyone to look up their voter registration status online and get registered quickly and easily. They can also invite their friends and family to view their status and quickly and easily register as well through Rock the Vote. The idea has promise, but the implementation left me with concerns. First of all, for something that is delving into such personal information, the site ought to be crystal clear about promising to not spam its users. You start out by filling out your...

Back in early September, Hillary Clinton's campaign made a big deal about how it had signed up its millionth supporter, a computer programmer from Georgia named Ron Wood. You can watch the video of Wood and his friend Michelle Smith meeting the Clintons, and traveling to a labor rally in Des Moines, here. Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle sent out an email bragging of the accomplishment: "What's the power of a million? It's the power to run a winning campaign; it's the power to restart the 21st century; it's the power to make history." As best as I can recall, that's the only metric of grassroots organizing the Clinton campaign has ever shared with the public. And the news that...

I ran across this little course-change by Hillary Clinton's campaign in Ben Smith's always-useful blog. In the course of a coffee-stop in Durham, NH, Hillary Clinton said she'd been working all her life "to improve the lives of young people" and pledged "to make sure you have the tools you need to make the most out of your own lives." Smith then notes: Her campaign also just announced that it's going to allow Facebook users to ask her questions directly through Facebook, and that she'll respond in videos to the "Ask Hillary" feature. Indeed, they have a form on their website where you can post a question and get an email letting you know when "you can tune back in for Hillary's...

I've been sick with the flu since last night and barely keeping up with anything. But in one of my (rare) lucid moments today I came across this post by "Lower Manhattanite" on The Group News Blog, a site that continues in the spirit of Steve Gilliard's News Blog. I'm white (and Jewish). Too often we whites assume that everyone else is like us, and I suspect, this unconscious impulse is even more prevalent online, since you usually can't tell a person's race or ethnicity simply from reading a blog post by them. (That's why we did a panel at last year's PdF conference entitled, "Is cyberspace colorblind?") If you're white, I think LM's post, which he titled "Pride and Palpitations,"...

Do younger voters have something to tell the rest of America? The League of Young Voters and MoveOn.org Political Action are betting that they do, and along with a growing coalition of youth-oriented groups, they are launching a "Facebook Primary" application aimed at highlighting the views of voters under the age of 35. In essence, they're launching a virtual presidential primary in every school and college in America today, along with many workplaces and localities. The primary is the most innovative political use of the Facebook Platform that I have seen so far, and if the League of Young Voters' application takes off, the primary could have a galvanizing effect among the millions of young people who spend upwards of...

...the results would be as blurry as any other poll of Democratic primary voters (except for the appearance of Congressman Dennis Kucinich bunched alongside Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton in the top four, each hovering a few points above or below 20%). That's only conclusion possible from today's announcement from MoveOn.org Political Action, which sent out an email to its members in response to queries about whether the group would be making an endorsement in the race. Says the group's Adam Ruben, "Over the past year, we've been asking about 30,000 MoveOn members each week, picked at random, to tell us who you favored in the Democratic presidential primary. It wasn't a binding vote, but it helped us...