The Web on the Candidates

It will truly be the first YouTube election. A week after MySpace announced they're hosting presidential town halls across the country, YouTube has announced they'll be co-sponsoring, with CNN, the first of six Democratic debates and are in talks to co-sponsor a Republican debate. There aren't any details on the format yet, but this is certainly a good development in light of the work that Larry Lessig and others have done to ensure that TV footage from the debates is legally accessible online. We'll follow up as we learn more.

In their latest Politics 2.0 column in the Politico, some guys named Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry (they have something to do with a certain technology and politics conference and web site) write about the rise of the netizen, a new breed of citizen-activists who "are mastering the new platforms, tools, information systems and social networks available online and using them to push new ideas or galvanize new communities for change." Presidential campaigns can't dismiss the influence of these "super-empowered citizens," because "unlike volunteers of old, if you cross them, they can hurt you on a national scale. If you embrace them, they may be more valuable than any consultant you can find."

The Web on the Candidates

James Kotecki is calling Hillary Clinton to task for not having posted a new "Hillcast" video in over six weeks. When she first started to post videos, they were a bit stilted and tight, and her call to "let the conversation begin" was contradicted by the sense that we were being talked at, not talked with. As Kotecki notes, her videos were better and more relaxed over time, but then they just stopped. Why has she stopped, he wonders, and when can she "let the conversation continue"?

To gaffe or not to gaffe? Joe Biden is making waves again with his blunt talk, this time telling a supporter at a fish fry that he would shove the Iraq funding bill down Bush's throat. While the comments below Ben Smith's Politico post about it are critical of Biden and the remark, Biden's own team is proud of it, and is promoting it on Biden's YouTube channel.

The Web on the Candidates

He got it wrong: Yesterday morning, Ben Smith of the Politico reported that John Edwards was suspending his campaign due to his wife Elizabeth's recurrence of cancer. As we know now, Edwards is staying in. Smith's source got it wrong, and Smith wrote a good piece describing how he got the story and the differences between reporting for a newspaper and for a blog. "Though I’ve spent the last several years at major newspapers – the New York Observer and the New York Daily News most recently – I’ve done much of my reporting on blogs, and have developed an instinct to let my readers know whatever I know, as soon as I know it... But the scale of this story was simply too big to report that way, to share information with high but imperfect confidence – and without making that level of confidence crystal clear. I should have waited for a second source, or hedged the item much more fully. Or simply waited for the news conference like everybody else." Hat tip to Smith for owning up to his error so quickly and openly. Very bloggy of him.

Eric Kleefeld at TPMCafe writes that a new Zogby Interactive poll finds that the "Vote Different" anti-Hillary video had no effect on two-thirds of of likely Democratic voters, and "the remaining one third were three times as likely to prefer Clinton after seeing it."

Ben Smith of The Politico reports that a new Hillary-obsessed website, JustHillary.com ('It's All About Her"), has launched. It chronicles its editor's obsession with Clinton and, by extension, the media's obsession as well. It features links to Hillary-centric news articles, editorials, blog posts, YouTube videos, and looks like it was designed in 1997.

A straw poll conducted by GOP Bloggers has Rudy Giuliani at the top of the heap at 32.2%, over 8% higher than Newt Gingrich, the runner-up. Another interesting metric is the "candidate acceptability" poll, in which Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel has a -67% approval rating, probably stemming from his break with President Bush on Iraq.