The Presidential Campaign Going Tech

Campaign websites (and the internet as a whole) has become vital to candidates in their bid for President. Just looking at Ron Paul's success with "Money Bombs" should give a big enough hint to candidates that this is a serious battleground.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, raised an astounding $6 million and change Sunday, his campaign said, almost certainly guaranteeing he'll outraise his rivals for the Republican nomination in the fourth quarter and likely will be able to fund a presence in many of the states that vote Feb. 5.

Paul's campaign spokesman late Sunday announced the campaign had eclipsed the $5.7 million that John Kerry raised the day after he locked up the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination – arguably the largest single-day fundraising haul in U.S. political history.

Paul, whose campaign has been embraced by a zealous community of online supporters, raised eyebrows when donors acting independently of the campaign dropped $4.2 million into his campaign coffers Nov. 5.

The campaign website plays a valuable role in persuading and informing a voter on a candidates positions. It is also a place to donate money, making it necessary to their campaigns longevity. The Hartford Courant has an article analyzing the candidates websites and their effectiveness.

While you're making the rounds of New Year's cocktail parties this year, there will be an easy way to establish which of your friends are politically Web-savvy, and which are not.

Just mention the 2008 presidential race and ask if they've seen, say, the compelling "Courageous Service" video on John McCain's campaign website, the entertaining "Five Brothers Blog" on Mitt Romney's site or the impressive Web book "The Plan to Build One America" that can be downloaded from John Edwards' site.

Spending a long, snowy afternoon cruising the campaign websites of the 13 major contenders can also lead to a refreshing insight. With a few glaring exceptions, the websites of most of the Republican and Democratic candidates are thorough and detailed, and make inventive use of videos and Internet "meet-up" technology, such as Facebook and YouTube. Voters who complain that politics in America are shallow and devoid of content probably haven't spent much time on the presidential websites.

They also graded each website by ease, design and content. Apparently Chris Dodd and Fred Thompson need a new web team, because they are both lacking, receiving the lowest grades. Clinton, Edwards, McCain and Romney seem to lead the pack in their delivery of website effectiveness. The big surprise is with Rudy, who despite strong showing in the national polls, hasn't put a lot into his website.

There is a sad side to campaign websites. Once the primaries are over, all of those "sure winner" and "game plan" articles become bittersweet in memory. There is also the sullen reaction of those who donated dollar after dollar to a losing candidate. But that's politics, it's a gamble at times.

Garden that website, watch your base grow.

Reagan's Shadow

Invoking Reagan? I don't think so. Patti Davis, daughter of President Ronald Reagan, is uneasy with candidates using her father as a prop in their campaign.

But that's not nearly as strange as seeing the 2008 presidential candidates try to imitate my father and proclaim themselves more Reaganesque than their competitors. Where is Lloyd Bentsen when you need him? "I knew Ronald Reagan… Senator [or Governor], you're no Ronald Reagan."

...I don't think I'm alone in my reaction to all of this when I say, "Do you think we're stupid?" If we want religious evangelism, we can turn on one of those cable channels. If we want leadership, we don't ask, "Now who has killed the most birds?" And most importantly, when we are thinking about trust and confidence, we don't look for someone who is trying to mimic anyone else.

WWRD(What Would Reagan Do?)

Where I found this article:
RealClearPolitics

24 Coming Back Too

Looks okay.

Lost Coming Back

I got chills.

Putin is Person of the Year

Time magazine has named Putin Person of the Year.

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.

Image is everything.

McCain looks into Putin's eyes...

“I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B,” McCain said of Putin, referring to his ties to the former Soviet spy agency.

McCain said today that he does not envision a re-ignition of the Cold War because Russia is too destitute to wield such power. However, he said the U.S. missed an opportunity to put Russia on a better track under the late former President Boris Yeltsin.

Kremlin Gazprom Bureaucrat (KGB) Dmitry Medvedev is next to rule.

Wednesday Three Spot

Venezuela gives Chavez a big NO.

Hugo Chávez appeared bemused rather than angry when the voters of Venezuela rejected his constitutional reforms in Sunday's referendum. It is easy to see why.

The eccentric leader has devoted the nine years of his presidency to the promulgation of the cult of Chávez. He has abused the machinery of the state, acquired control over much of the media and deployed the country's oil wealth; all to that end.

How galling it must be, then, that when he asks for a popular mandate for changes that would complete his socialist revolution, the people say "no".

No to Dictatorship!

Putin gives Putin a big YES

THE ONLY MAJOR surprise of Russia's parliamentary "election," which could not have been choreographed better by Diaghilev, is that it had even the Communists lamenting the death of democracy. Gennady Zyuganov, chairman of the party, said on Sunday, "We do not trust these figures unveiled by the Central Election Commission and we will conduct a parallel count. It is already clear that in Siberia and other regions the results have been adjusted according to pre-arranged plans I would like to say this to the authorities: stop, you are abusing the whole country."

and Kasparov gets jailed.

For years the governments of the U.S. and Europe have tried to accept Vladimir Putin's Russia as an equal. Western diplomats now acknowledge that there are differences between Russia and the West, but say these differences are minor, and -- in the words of one European Union official -- within an "acceptable range."

For me and for a dozen of my associates this week, that "acceptable range" was 120 square feet. That's the size of the jail cell I occupied for five days as punishment for "disobeying the orders of a police officer" at an opposition rally in Moscow last Saturday. That's the charge a Moscow district court added after the fact, a charge not mentioned in the handwritten testimony of the arresting officers.

Down with Putinism!

And some writers are angry (along with others, including myself) about the lack of talk about Zimbabwe and Darfur at the EU-Africa summit in Portugal in the coming week.

The writers, who include Vaclav Havel and Nadine Gordimer, said the two crises should be on the agenda of next weekend's EU-Africa summit in Portugal.

In an open letter, they called the omission "political cowardice"...
The group of more than dozen prominent writers said millions of Europeans and Africans would expect Darfur and Zimbabwe to be at the top of the agenda of the summit.

"What can we say of this political cowardice? We expect our leaders to lead, and lead with moral courage," the writers' said in an open letter published on Tuesday in newspapers in Europe and Africa.

"When they fail to do so they leave all of us morally impoverished."

End the suffering in Darfur! End the dictatorship of Mugabe!

Three issues, three problems, hopefully, three solutions.