Earlier today, Josh linked to a piece on the excellent website Spot-on that finds a Democratic connection to the “Gays for Giuliani” video that came out (hah!) last week. Specifically, author Scott Olin Schmidt points to the fact that the site mentioned at the end of the video is registered to Mike Rogers, who writes for Huffington Post in addition to his own site and who has been controversial for outing Republicans in the past.
Just got an interesting email from the DNC asking me to…no, not to give money, but to send a thank-you note. (Paging Miss Manners…). Actually, it’s a clever idea, since constant begging for donations can be a big turnoff for supporters and can hasten an email list’s decline.
Instead, in this case, the message asks recipients to send a note of support to a Democratic local organizer, using a national party field staff conference as a hook. Of course, there IS a donate button at the bottom of the message (they’d be crazy to leave it off), but it’s not the focus. And when I took the bait and sent a nice note through the party’s online form, I was redirected not to a donations form (which I expected) but to a tell-a-friend page. Who knows what happens to the actual thank-you notes once you hit the submit button, but this seems like an excellent list-maintenance and list-building exercise. And, it helps keep supporters focused on local political organizing, which has been a party priority under Howard Dean.
Update: The Republicans fire back! An email arrived from the RNC an hour or so after the Dem note (I’m on both lists, natch) touting a match-Democratic-candidates-with-their-positions game. I gave it a try, but I gotta say, kind of lame execution — aren’t games supposed to be fun? This one’s neither terribly intuitive nor particularly rewarding, and the spin applied to the Democratic candidates’ statements is dizzying. Next!
More news from the land of random widgetry: the Post’sThe Fix column has its own RSS widget, which I just noticed today displayed in an advertising bubble between its first two stories. The other Post blogs I checked didn’t seem to offer a similar feature; maybe Fix author Chris Cillizza is a hardcore tech-nerd and made them do it (let’s ask). [Update: Chris says several popular Post blogs have them; I must have missed them. Another tactic: at the bottom of this page, note the topic-specific example that displays headlines about the Iraq war. But wait! there's more.] One nice extra: easy instructions on the download page for installing on MySpace and common blogging plaforms.
I gotta get me one of these — that way you kids will never be too far from your favorite e.politics characters (action figures available soon).
If you’re in the enviro advocacy world, you’re almost certainly familiar with the online magazine Grist, a widely read source of green news and commentary. To promote its coverage of the 2008 presidential candidates on the environment, Grist is providing readers a simple RSS widget that displays the latest headlines in their “How Green Is Your Candidate?” feature:
Hi y’all, e.politics is back on the case after a long summer weekend full of exciting adventures and interesting moral lapses — hope you didn’t miss us too much. Let’s catch up real quick with what’s been going on while I’ve been running amok:
Leaving the tedium of The Eternal Campaign for the turmoil of The Middle Kingdom, last week activists used a cell phone camera and Skype to post video online of a massive Free Tibet banner being unrolled on the Great Wall of China. Also, hackers cracked open the official United Nations site and created some new policy positions for Ban Ki-Moon — not quite John McCain opining in favor of gay marriage, “particularly marriage between two passionate females,” but good fun nonetheless.
Finally, check out the debate that unfolded right here on e.pol yesterday over the “Gays for Giuliani” video — a couple of readers had some sincere and serious objections to it, which provided the opportunity for a quite pleasant airing of views. An example of how blogs really can foster conversation.
Genius citizen video via techPresident and others — a gay New Yorker wants to “remind Rudy who he was when he was mayor and to let Republican primary voters have some idea on the man they’re voting for.” Micah Sifry describes it as “deeply subversive,” and one viewing will tell you why, since these guys are really out to horrify Republican primary voters, and they’re not ashamed to ham up stereotyped characters to do it. Take a look:
According to director Ryan Davis’s MySpace blog entry, there’ll be more to come. This one’s been picked up all over the place, so let’s see if it makes some real waves. I’ve long felt that Rudy’s apparent strength in the polls will evaporate once average Republican primary voters look past the tough-guy pose (remember the Onion article about his running for President of 9/11?) and realize that they actually agree with him on very little. The nice thing about this video is that while it definitely has fun with and gains emotional punch through stereotypes, it makes its points with facts.
BTW, looking at the most-recent posts on the site, it’s clear I’ve been writing about the Republicans a lot lately. The Democratic field has really settled down now, and there just hasn’t been much to say since the YouTube debate. Hey Dems, can one of you kids stir things up a bit? C’mon Biden, you REALLY want to take a swing at Gravel, don’t you…just be sure that the video is shot with good lighting and good sound. Finally, congrats to the techPrez team for the award nomination — nice work!
With the Ames Straw Poll only days away, Republican presidential candidates are seizing the high ground in Iowa, according to Slate’s John Dickerson. For example,
Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback are engaged in a multiround spat over sub-rosa attacks. Both camps have questioned the other’s Christian fiber. Tom Tancredo is being attacked in phone calls and e-mails for changing his position on term limits. In a Web video he accuses Brownback of telling pro-life voters Tancredo is pro-abortion. “We do expect more from people who at least call themselves Christians and have great family values,” says Tancredo, demanding an apology.
Ah, good fun all around — and with only the leadership of the world’s sole superpower at stake. What puts e.politics on the case is this little element:
New technology has made it easier to dish such dirt. You don’t have to slip a flier under a windshield wiper anymore. No more cutting out letters from the newspaper. You can unleash a little havoc with a few keystrokes or by launching a Web page. Slime by keystroke is more effective during the caucuses and primaries than in the general election because your audience is comprised largely of activists who are already known. Many of them are probably on a party e-mail list or supporter list from a previous GOP campaign. Those lists are available to lots of different campaigns.
Excellent — not only does the Internet open up the political process to previously unheard voices, level the playing field, bring low the mighty and lift high the miserable, but it also lets us be a complete bastard to the other guy. Such an improvement over the days of yore, when according to legend, LBJ once tried to spread a rumor that an opponent had had marital relations with a pig “just ’cause I want to hear him deny it.”
Woe be unto you, iPhone fans, for Karl Rove is among your tribe:
According to Farhad Manjoo at Salon, this new development fatally undercuts the spell of iPhone-coolness, and no sensible person could disagree. Apple stock-plunge in three…two…one….
Sunday’s fascinating Post profile of Fred Thompson’s wife Jeri contained a little glimpse of the Good Old Days of the early political Internet. Turns out, when they were first dating and her last name was still Kehn, she pitched him on a personal political website separate from his official Senate site:
On Aug. 5, 1997, Kehn sent Thompson’s Senate office a 12-page proposal to “design, develop, host and maintain a world-class multimedia Web site” at a cost of $45,000 per year. As her qualification for the contract, Kehn cited her job at a small Nashville firm that provided daily news summaries to health-care companies.
Two weeks later, Thompson’s staff sharply rejected the proposal, according to memos located by the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the Thompson Senate archives, stored at the University of Tennessee. “I consider this project technically vague and stunningly overpriced,” a staff member wrote.
I remember those days! When people threw around “multimedia” and “interactive” without the slightest idea what they were talking about — but every proposal needed those magic words.
Or, at least she did until this morning — shortly after a reporter contacted her, she pulled out of the Facebook group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).” Slate has details; Caroline Giuliani and her brother Andrew have apparently not gotten along with dad so much since he remarried. Gotta love these Internets of ours — hey kids, guess what! Put something online, and it might just be a little public.
The big news in the online political world today is the now-annual gathering-of-the-lefty-tribe known as YearlyKos, and the Democratic presidential campaigns are on hand greet the potentially faithful. It’s in Chicago this time around, and apparently I’m missing a hell of a party (dammit). But, the techPrez kids are live-blogging it and the major developments are getting plenty of press coverage, so we’ll at least get the highlights — for instance, the DNC is happy to share opposition research on the Republican presidential candidates, though tragically, they seem to have left out the part about Romney being a robot.
Jose’s overview story in today’s Post hits on a couple of points frequently missing from the conversation when TV pundits talk about the lefty blogosphere:
There is no one leader, the name of the convention notwithstanding, and it’s a disparate, unorganized community that’s almost impossible to categorize. While the leading bloggers are in their 20s and 30s, the rank-and-file are older, in their 40s and 50s. The common assumption is that the Net roots is monolithic and full of ideologues. It is neither. It is made up of people who are mostly interested in getting Democrats elected — and making sure Democrats stay in power.
Non-commandante Markos also seems to have learned some humility, or at least the ability to project it:
“The fact is, the Net roots cannot win elections by ourselves,” Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos and the namesake of the event, said this week. “But we can be a key component to a winning Democratic strategy.”
Mainstream media and the pundit class often seem obsessed with the political blogs to the exclusion of the rest of online campaigning, but it remains true that each major lefty blog and online community gathers politically passionate people who are disproportionately likely to be active in supporting (or opposing) campaigns. David All is jealous — he wants the Right to have a Netroots community, too.
