The Web on the Candidates

• They’re back! A week after the head McCain Girl chastised those damn critics who make fun of her videos, the Girls return with another remix — just watch it to see how they insert McCain into it (hint: it involves puns and floating heads). You’ll find it either fantastic or terrible, depending on your tolerance for karaoke candidate-rock. It’s filled with as many idiosyncrasies and non-sequiturs as the first video, and with lines like, “is it McCaining with you?” it’s simply priceless. But techPres contributor Mike Turk isn’t sure the girls are helping McCain. “They’re trying to help McCain, but going about it the wrong way. What they really need to do is release something that looks like a terrorist hostage video. They would have a big map of America and hold a knife up to it... The audio would feature the McCain girls pledging to release one music video a week between now and the election unless two demands are met."

• The LA Times has a great piece about online political video, noting that “political video is whizzing around faster than you can tape your cat mouthing ‘superdelegate.’” Taking a close look at the folks creating mashups and responses to campaign videos, the writers (there’s no byline, aside from listing staff writer Maria Russo as a contributor) talk to a handful of web video producers like the folks at Brave New Films, Barely Political, and Hot Air. Required reading.

• Congrats to the Washington Post for winning six Pulitzer Prizes this week, including one for a series of articles on the Virginia Tech massacre. One of our favorite political-technology reporters, Jose Antonio Vargas, wrote two of those nine pieces, one of which was an interview with a Virginia Tech student he connected to on Facebook. Congrats Jose!

• A proposed bill in California that would restrict access to valuable mapping data in favor of high-paying corporations has been withdrawn. The bill was set for a hearing as recently as this weekend, but according to Adina Levin, a tech consultant leading the charge against it, “The bill had little support and much opposition.”

The Candidates on the Web

• The National Journal’s Kevin Friedl has a smart piece on John McCain’s recent slew of web videos, which are a big part of his ongoing bio tour. Friedl points out the most popular of these videos has only reached about 14,000 views, compared to about 250,000 views of his official TV spots. Who, then, are these meant for? McCain spokeswoman Crystal Denton hints at it: The ads are meant to “frame the discussion,” which means that they’re for journalists and bloggers like us to snap up. Looks like the strategy worked.

In Case You Missed It…

Chris Rabb recommends that instead of bowling, Barack Obama needs to dunk on camera, often. While the post strays from our usual tech-and-politics chatter, a good conversation emerged beneath it, including a clarification from Micah Sifry.

Yesterday I got my meathooks on some juicy new Yahoo! Buzz data showing voters’ searching trends nationally, in Pennsylvania, and in North Carolina. To get a sense of how the web aligns with offline opinion and how it diverges from it, I compared Yahoo’s search trends to real-life polls I’ve used averages from Real Clear Politics, a site that has established itself as the ultimate in political data porn. For me anyway.

Micah Sifry spies a nationwide truckers’ strike just over the horizon. And something is brewing that — with the help of the web — could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation.

We’re happy to announce a new PdF book project called Rebooting America: Democracy in the 21st Century, an anthology of essays from leading thinkers and activists (check out the impressive list here) that we’ll be publishing to coincide with this year’s Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York City. And we need your help: tell us your great idea to reinvent democracy in America (and maybe win a free pass this year’s Personal Democracy Forum for free!)