Sen. Barack Obama
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

Which means, we presume, maybe until June, maybe until November. We’re guessing he means the latter.

In a posting dated May 9th on ClickZ’s network, the Obama for America campaign lists the marketing position as full time and based in Chicago, Obama’s hometown. He’s equal opportunity for the most part since only Obama supporters need apply, and applicants should have expertise in search engine marketing, SEO, display advertising, Flash animation, and Web video experience.

Obama’s campaign has been Internet savvy from the get-go, taking advantage of popular social networks, YouTube and other video sites. Earlier in the campaign, Obama was the only candidate among the three remaining who spoke at the Googleplex to outline a detailed 21st Century technology plan.

All three candidates already have paid search campaigns running, so the open position could mean Obama is set to go full force into leveraging the Web to get his message out.

Following sponsored links for all three candidates leads to landing pages, two of which—Clinton’s and McCain’s—make immediate calls for donations. In fact, it’s hard to get away from Clinton’s extended hand; navigating away from her first donation prompt leads to another donation-pushing landing page. Navigating away from that page leads finally to the official website where visitors again are ubiquitously prompted to give whatever’s in their pockets.

Obama’s landing page asks only for participation and donations are prompted via one link on the homepage, reinforcing what most know already: Hillary’s broke—unless she dips into that $100 million again.

Luckily, he’s not up for election—well, not technically.

Michael "Mickey" Kantor, American politician
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

Today a video excerpt of the movie "The War Room" went viral in a matter of hours after being posted on YouTube. The video showed former Clinton White House staffer and current Hillary Clinton campaign advisor, Mickey Kantor, during the 1992 Presidential race, saying "Those people are shit," and another phrase that is under dispute and at the heart of Kantor’s threats of libel litigation.

The first questionable statement was reported by the video uploader and those who spread it around to be in reference to the people of Indiana. In numerous reports, Kantor denied that was the case and claimed to be referring to pollsters. The second statement, which immediately followed the first, was somewhat unintelligible in the original footage. Confirmed as altered by the film’s director, D.A. Pennebaker, the video in question made it appear Kantor said, "How would you like to be a worthless white n*gger?"

Which both doesn’t make sense and is incredibly offensive. It’s difficult to find the video now because YouTube has removed it. If the video posted at DigitalJournal.com is still there, it seems to be from the original and, to my ears anyway, seems to confirm other interpretations that Kantor actually said, "How would you like to be in the White House right now?"

Kantor told the HuffingtonPost that what he said was indecipherable, but he would never have used that word and used his and his parents civil rights work as his defense. Right after calling the video libelous, this curious passage appeared in the report:

Kantor said he was in the process of contacting "the best" libel lawyers to approach YouTube.com about the process of removing the video from its site. He suggested that The Huffington Post, too, should not print even his defense, as it would be an advancement of a non-story.

 "I don’t need to be defended," he wrote. "When you write it, what you are doing is extended the libel."

In all that civil rights work he did, he must have overlooked freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which is weird because they’re first on the list. The press can, actually, talk about the event all they want and shouldn’t have to fear being bullied into not talking about it because it’s uncomfortable for a person who arguably could be called a public figure. It is news, it is fair game, and it is fit to print.

At least eight news organizations thought so too, according to current stories on Google news, including the Huffington Post, and around 600 bloggers so far. Good luck in keeping the legitimate story quiet, there Mickey, and in a court that doesn’t throw it out. You’ll definitely need the best libel lawyers to make that argument for you.

Trying to keep something quiet once it’s hit YouTube and Digg.com is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. The good news is that the truth came out rather quickly in this case. Journalists did their skeptical duties, and even Diggers were quick to raise the flag that the story was inaccurate. YouTube responded appropriately, also.   

In this case, trying to keep it quiet just brings on the Streisand Effect, which makes it worse. If left alone, the truth would have been told with the controversy and all gone away by Monday.

It also brings up a point the Clinton campaign wouldn’t want brought up: The guilt-by-association politics Obama has had to put up with as the Clinton camp gleefully shakes hands in the background. Should we believe then that Kantor’s remarks are a reflection of how Hillary Clinton plans to deal with the media? What was a good question to George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson in Philadelphia should be good here as well, right?  
 

On Saturday night, things were not all right for Obama’s site visitors. Those who tried to visit the community section of those pages found themselves at an entirely unwanted destination – the website to elect Hillary Clinton to the Presidency.

A video on YouTube showed the redirection in action. Zennie Abraham, who runs a company called Sports Business Simulations, discovered the problem when trying to reach his blog on the Obama site.

“This is serious because it means Senator Clinton could also unethically poach donors from the Obama campaign via online website redirects like this,” he wrote. “Terrible and unethical.”

Abraham also pointed out the site had been developed by Blue State Digital, a design firm that has created numerous sites for Democratic candidates and like-minded people and businesses. A flaw in Obama’s site could be present in others designed by the firm.

Someone identifying themselves as Mox from Liverpool, IL, claimed to be responsible for the attack on the Obama website. “All I did was exploit some poorly written HTML code,” wrote Mox.

By putting certain characters in the blog’s name when creating it on Obama’s site, the characters become part of the URL. Put the right characters in it, and if they aren’t sanitized by the application creating the blog, a cross-site condition would come into being.

Mox’s explanatory post ends abruptly, so it isn’t known if the individual confessed to doing this in support of the Clinton candidacy or not. However, Mox claims the flaw has been fixed on the site.

The title struck me as funny: "Philly Fight Night: Dems Spar Over Electability." It was funny to me because my wife was surprised last night a primary debate was on a major broadcast network instead of CNN or other news channel. I responded that the Democratic race had become a kind of Wrestlemania.

I didn’t know Gibson and Stephie were going to pull Obama into a three-on-one cage match. But that’s pretty much what happened. If you were one of many who likely turned off the debate after 45 minutes of "Barack, why are you such a jerk" questions, they did actually get to some issues that mattered. Why, right there at the end, the candidates got one full minute each to address the gas crisis.

But the flag pin question is important, too, I guess, in Bizarro America where steroids become cause for Congressional investigations and former Clinton White House staffers somehow don’t have a conflict of interest while moderating a very important debate.

Anyway, I’m not the only one complaining about it. ABC News is probably wishing they never enabled viewer commentary on their site  – sometimes Web 2.0-style feedback can feel like a virtual lynching. I don’t know what the record for number of comments on an interactive site is, but this has to approach the record, at least for a broadcast network site.

Here are a few choice comments:

Trash. Plain and simple. What a waste of time. ABC owes the American people an apology. I now understand more than ever why I don’t watch ABC news.

 

How low ABC news has fallen along with the rest of American television journalism. It’s hard to believe that this was once the network of Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, who always assumed the intelligence of their audience. What we saw last night was tabloid journalism of the worst sort. The MSM bears a strong responsibility for the debasement of our political discourse and with it of our democracy, precisely because of their focus on this kind of trivia. Shame on ABC! Shame on George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson!!

Totally pathetic – when CG and GS weren’t sobbing over those poor souls making 200K+ who might have to pay more taxes, they were focusing on the most inane issues possible (Lapel pins? Seriously?). Thanks for killing democracy guys! And you wonder why network news is failing and Jon Stewart’s ratings are soaring…

Watching this "debate" with my eighteen year-old son made me ashamed of being an adult. How can I expect him to take voting seriously when our national media treat the election process so shabbily?

wow abc how embarassing for you. I expect tmz.com could run a better debate.

 

That last one seems especially harsh, don’t you think? Oh well. One thing we can say about the power of the Internet and the now two-way conversation between media and the public is that the public has a much better an efficient way of letting the media know what’s what.

_{*The word "miffed" officially wins the Understatement of the Day Award}
 

I say that with a general awareness that there is more variety in "liberal" thought than presented by Camille Paglia (whose scalding editorial on Clinton is a must-read, whether her viewpoints are legitimate or not, just for historical perspective) and The Huffington Post. So forgive me if I generalize too much. I’m going on what information comes to my attention.

Disclaimer: I’ve become more liberal over the years, especially in recent years as I observe (and feel) the way conservatives have been bending us over. In general, though, at least in theory, I’m a libertarian unless provoked otherwise.

You expect it, and offer some deference where appropriate, when leftist writers go after Republicans, but it’s likely to cause a double-take when they go after Hillary, the elitist-ordained queen of all things Left, Hip, and Progressive. Part of that is handed down from her husband, no doubt, but at least she would represent – again, in theory – the flipside of the establishment.

And just being a woman means that she sort of does. And unless you’re stubborn as a stripped screw-head, you’d be willing to accept she couldn’t do worse than W. Just being likeable would help her case all the more – like Barack is likeable.

Oh, and don’t forget less on the Paulist side of spreading the Gospel: I have become all things to all people so that I might save them [from the Republicans]. Paul didn’t have the benefit of mass media to push his faith nor the bane of it to compare what he might have said in one place or the other.

But enough about that and back to Hillary and Barack, where they stand on broadband, and how Net Neutrality supporters are throwing their support to the silver-tongued Illinoisan.

Matt Stoller, a blogger whose posts you might see on The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, FreePress.net and SaveTheInternet.com (all, to say the least of some of them, on the left side of the broadband regulation debate), recently highlighted Clinton’s Connect America Plan.

Stoller concludes that Clinton’s proposal for broadband expansion "may allow the destruction of the Internet."

That may be kind of hard to do – you know, destroy it – but Stoller’s ratcheted-up rhetoric does bring to light how Clinton and other Congressional Democrats plan to model their broadband expansion policies on Connect Kentucky, which isn’t as gumdrops-and-butterflies as it’s made out to be.

Stoller directs us to a lengthy Art Brodsky expose about Kentucky’s heralded (nay, KoolAid-fueled) broadband expansion. Brodsky does the homework much of the press in Kentucky either didn’t bother to pursue, didn’t understand enough to investigate, or didn’t believe the general public would understand.

Thanks to a political climate set up by the infamous "love gov" Paul Patton (a cousin of mine, but don’t tell anybody) and his corporate lackey successor Ernie Fletcher, BellSouth, now AT&T, was able to run that show, and profit from it while access in the state got only marginally better, and in many cases caused Kentucky to fall further behind – much like the US has done compared to other nations when under the direction of the profit-loving telecoms.

It was relatively easy to take over the rural areas: access was lacking already. Already decent in the more-populated areas, city-folk didn’t notice what was happening "out in the county," as we might say.

For example, I work in Lexington, but live in a town (if you can call it that) that up until 20 years ago or so people were still dialing only four digits for local calls. Let’s just say it’s south and east, the general direction of the proposed improvements.

BellSouth busted Southeast Telephone’s block, the only real phone competitor, leaving the choice of broadband in my area between BellSouth and TimeWarner, which everybody in the neighborhood (okay, town) says just doesn’t keep up either. BellSouth is definitely the best available, but there’s not much available.

But at least we have broadband, which is more than can be said for other places, despite reports that 97 percent of Kentucky is wired up. Other, less self-interested measurers (i.e., numbers not produced by BellSouth-run Connect Kentucky insiders) have broadband penetration at under 33 percent, and say Kentucky ranks in the upper 40s out of 50 states in other key indicators, in some instances lower than when the project began.

The same AT&T/BellSouth flunkies in charge of Fletcher’s Kentucky Connect are headed upstairs to run a similar program for the whole country, and Clinton is a big champion of that, perhaps just because it sounds good and is saleable to a greater number of people than will actually put it under scrutiny.

And remember, Kentucky has a tradition of being exactly where mainstream America is in terms of social consciousness and values; take a look at how many years in a row the state’s electors have voted for the eventual winner of the Presidential election. We’re better than fortune tellers in that respect.

This is one reason more liberal technologically savvy pundits are throwing their support behind Obama, instead, as – at least, like everything else he says, as demonstrated by his pretty words – his agenda for Internet growth is more inline with consumer needs and protections, even if it’s less politically attractive in some respects, what with a real understanding for how it works and a lack of appropriate buzzwords to sell to the masses.

Though John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Biden all saw traffic to their websites increase by double-digit percentages (30, 53, and 60 respectively), their overall numbers are still dwarfed by the two frontrunners.

While Obama has an even split of male and female visitors, Clinton’s visitors skew female at 56 percent. The largest percentage (26 percent) of Obama’s visitors are under 25 years old.

If measured by the number of states that have more heavily visited the frontrunners’ websites, Obama leads there too, with 29 out of the contiguous states, compare to 19 for Clinton.

Anne Zelenka provided a graph that shows searches for “hillary clinton” with a clear lead over those for “barack obama” and “john edwards.”  The content of the graph was, by the way, originally suggested by Google’s own Marissa Mayer.

So what does this mean?  All other issues (representative sample, etc.) aside, there’s one major problem: whether or not all the searches for Clinton reflect positive interest (or at least less negative interest than whatever’s present in the searches for other candidates). 

Still, Zelenka noted, “Mayer showed how Google Trends accurately predicted George W. Bush’s dominance over John Kerry in 2004 and Nicolas Sarkozy’s win in May of this year over Segolene Royal in the French presidential election.”

And in semi-related news, Jonathan Richards began an article by stating, “Bill and Hillary Clinton are among the guests expected to descend on a tiny Caribbean island this weekend for the wedding of Larry Page, the billionaire co-founder of Google.”

Surprisingly, “Hillary Clinton dropped her Web display advertising efforts completely,” according to ClickZ’s Kate Kaye.  This doesn’t mean she’s broke – reports indicate that Clinton has raised more money than everyone other than Barack Obama – but the move still left just two other candidates to be tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings (which supplied the original data).

Those candidates are John McCain and Mitt Romney.  Kaye reports that “Romney ran about 3.4 million impressions of four ad creatives.”  In contrast, “McCain’s campaign, which ran about 8.7 million impressions in May, still appears to be testing a variety of ad creatives and sizes, placing ads on the same sites and networks as in April.”

Kayte goes on to give extensive information about (and samples of) McCain’s ads, and it really is an impressive effort on the candidate’s part.  Yet I usually don’t even look at ads, never mind click on them or let them influence a decision; for reasons like this, I should point out that the Nielsen//NetRatings data is open to interpretation, and that Web ad buying alone isn’t likely to carry the election, anyway.

Still, it’s interesting (and somewhat encouraging) to see a candidate embrace the Internet as an advertising medium.

The difference in this video, however, is that Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton is the perceived “voice of controlling evil” that the protagonist in the clip is desperate to silence with the mighty hammer of justice. The message that follows promises that 2008 will be much different than 1984 and points to BarackObama.com.

The Obama campaign, however, claims no official ties with the progenitor of this surprisingly professional retouching of Apple’s advertisement. Nevertheless, whether or not the Illinois senator officially endorses the video matters little in the grand scheme of the evolving political landscape.

The truth is that as sites like YouTube continue to grow in popularity, voters are more likely to form their opinions based on the content of anonymous users rather than the official campaign messages delivered from the respective camps of the candidates themselves. Most would initially view this sort of paradigm shift as a good thing, but there are negatives to be considered as well.

Yes, socially driven campaign messages lack the spin that candidates try to attach to relevant issues. However, if you thought mudslinging was bad between the actual candidates, just wait until you see what their overzealous supporters will have in store for the primaries and the presidential election.

The 1984 pro-Obama video you see here is tame compared to the kind of content we’re sure to come across as things continue to heat up in the political realm.

Now, more than ever, the power to make or break a politician’s career rests in the hands of the average citizen. If you don’t want to take my word for it, perhaps you should ask George Allen what he thinks of YouTube.