The Web on the Candidates

• The New York Times’ Matt Bai has been around campaigns in their final moments, and has seen what happens when passionate staffers suddenly have to figure out what to do with their lives. After John Edwards dropped out of the race, Bai talked to Tracy Russo, the fantastic blogger for his campaign. “Campaigns are like families. It hit everybody at different moments this morning,” Russo told him. “At least now we have time to sleep in and go see the doctors we haven’t gone to in six months.” Russo has garnered amazing respect from the netroots during her tenure with Edwards; we’ll suspect she’ll be around for a long time.

• Barack Obama and Ron Paul have confirmed that they’ll join Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee at tomorrow’s MTV and MySpace “Closing Arguments” event. It’s a super-sized version of the presidential dialogues with John McCain and John Edwards that proved successful for the candidates, who thrived in that context, the voters, who got to participate in the events in real-time, and MTV and MySpace, who smoothly handled the onffline experience. It will air on MTV, MTV2, MTVTr3s, and stream on ChooseOrLose.com and Myspace.com.

• MTV has also been busy training a battalion of citizen journalists called Street Team ‘08 to cover the race, arming them every kind of hi-tech gadget known to man — Nokia N95 phones, laptops, video cameras, and kitchen knives, to name a few — and they’ll be put to the test this Tuesday. They’ll be streaming reports in real-time from all 23 primary states on MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com. If MTV’s other election coverage is any indication, it should be pretty impressive stuff.

• A new site called PolFeeds collects all of the online content produced by the presidential campaigns, Members of Congress, and the White House and makes it easily available and subscribable (aggregable?). There’s really a wealth of information there — just type in the name of any Member of Congress before the url (hillaryclinton.polfeeds.com, for example) and you’ll see the most recent content from their site. It even pulls in John Boehner’s Twitter posts!

• Yours truly was on Brian Lehrer’s TV show this week, along with Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland. Catch the video, in which I decode an endlessly complex set of charts, here.

The Candidates on the Web

• Hillary Clinton — who’s working hard to prove her web cred by participating in tomorrow’s Closing Arguments on MTV and MySpace — is also hosting a “national town hall” this Monday, in which she’ll answer questions from supporters. It will simultaneously air on the Hallmark channel and stream on her website, and this time, not only can you submit questions on her website via a webform (she loves those forms!) but also via text and YouTube. Now we’re talking. It’s never too late to start that conversation, right?

• Barack Obama announced that he’s raised $32 million dollars in January alone; if there was any doubt left that he can raise a ton of money, it’s erased now. No word on how much of that was raised online, but we bet it’s a lot: he amassed 100,000 donors in the first half of the month, and at one point after South Carolina was taking in $500,000 an hour.

In Case You Missed It…

It’s the last Friday before Super Tuesday — gosh, are we really here? — and we’re chock full of fun vids. Hulk Hogan “endorses” Barack Obama; Mike Gravel produces another talk/rap video; the Rapping Pizza gets infectious; and Hillary takes a fall. And much more, of course.

We got our hands on some Yahoo Buzz stats for the Democrats in New York State that show that, while Barack Obama enjoyed a huge surge in attention directly before and after the South Carolina primary, Hillary Clinton has been enjoying a rise in attention too. And MoveOn’s endorsement primary could turn out to be a big deal for the winner, who will get the weight of 3.2 million members between him or her.

If he wins, John McCain will have spent roughly $40 million to secure the nomination against two vastly better funded opponents. That is a far cry from the conventional wisdom that it would take $100 million to compete, writes Patrick Ruffini

When somebody asks Zephyr Teachout about how the internet changes politics, she wants to tell them about canvassing, because Internet-enabled canvassing creates spaces that never existed before.

Be sure to check out Ari Melber’s piece in the Nation about MoveOn’s Democratic primary, in which they’re asking their 3.2 million members to vote for their preferred Dem.

Barack Obama | Brian Lehrer | Hillary Clinton | MTV | MySpace | Ron Paul
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