(Note from Nancy: I'll be on vacation from tomorrow through Friday, August 15. PdF editor Micah Sifry and PdF's Josh Sherman will be helming the Daily Digest. Enjoy!)

The Web on the Candidates

• "Tell Me Who You Walk With and I'll Tell You Who You Are": McCainsLobbyists.com, a new project out of Campaign Money Watch, aims to enmesh John McCain in a web of lobbyist cash and connections. Frankly, the site is somewhat confusing, and where it succeeds it's largely as a general indictment of lobbying rather than of McCain himself. But as we've seen with People for the American Way's The Right-Wing Facebook and the RNC's BarackBook, politicos are coming to understand how much social networks matter in 2008. All are sensible recognitions of the fact that politicians are often as much a product of their political connections are they are of their personal character. #

• The POTUS in a Bubble: Jumping into the debate over McCain's tech savvy, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark argues that a U.S. president today indeed needs to know the Internet. Why? Because America's wired society today functions as one big "permanent town hall," and a president who doesn't get online culture is destined to live disconnected from the people he's elected to serve. It's an interesting twist on the debate from Craig, who's more likely to introduce himself as a Craigslist customer service rep than as anything else. But it begs the question: with the same measly 24 hours allocated to a day inside the White House as the rest of us get, is it realistic to expect our president and his staff to be engaged online in any meaningful way? #
  

The Candidates on the Web

• Barack Obama is on Social Networks that Don't Even Exist Yet: The Obama campaign is making good use of Scribd, a little-known but elegant document-sharing site. (Think Flickr for term papers). Obama's 8-page "New Energy Plan for America" has been viewed 2,100 times and has gotten 24 comments; also available for remarkably easy viewing: "Barack Obama on Katrina and the Gulf Coast," "Barack Obama on Stem Cells," and 30 other policy papers. Yeah, we know, we know -- who's reading policy papers these days? And indeed, his Scribd docs have been viewed just 10,000 times. But this effort has three things going for it. One, it makes detailed issue info easy to find for both the public and press. Two, it reaffirms the vision of Obama as a substantive candidate that the campaign would love us to have dancing around our heads right now. And three, it's a smart way to repackage and repurpose materials the campaign, it seems, already had on hand. #

• Spotlight on Vices: The Democratic National Committee has just launched TheNextCheney.com to so frame Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, South Dakota Senator John Thune, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, FedEx CEO Fred Smith, and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor. The messaging is admittedly garbled. (Smith once attempted to fast-track union negotiations and that makes him like Dick Cheney because...oh boy, we're lost.) But the purpose it clear. The current vice president, it's no surprise to learn, is one of the DNC's targets as it attempts to paint McCain as running for a third George W. Bush term. While the conventional wisdom has long been that voters don't pick a president for his or her running mate, there's sort of pre-Cheney and post-Cheney conventional wisdom when it comes to veeps. The DNC wants badly to tie McCain to the Bush-Cheney administration -- with, perhaps, as much emphasis on the guy who lives at the Naval Observatory as on the one who lives in the White House. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• A Public Whipping: The Sunlight Foundation, Change Congress, Public Citizen, and a handful of other good government groups have launched Pass223.com, a campaign to have the public whip for legislation that would require Senate campaign financial records to be filed electronically -- making that fundraising data easier for the FEC to work with and actually useful for the rest of us. (Note: PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry serve as senior technical advisors to Sunlight.) S. 223, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, was introduced by Thad Cochran (R-MS) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) and has since gathered 42 bipartisan co-sponsors. Its passage, though, is being held up by a poison pill amendment formally offered by John Ensign (R-NV) that would require outside organizations filing ethics complaints against sitting Senators to disclose how they fill their coffers. This is the take three for the bill. It was first introduced back in the 108th congress, which opened in 2003. #

• Don't Go -- Hashtag, Movement, Hashmovement?: We've been covering the ongoing #dontgo situation on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans have taken to the chamber's floor in a sort of recess sit-in, in protest of the House's adjournment before taking up domestic oil drilling and other energy measures. The action has produced buckets and buckets of tweets over the last few days, and now some Republican consultants and congresspeople are striking while the iron is hot to attempt to turn the uprising into a full-fledged Don't Go movement. MoveOn, it seems, is now planning to jump into the mix to redefine what has now been an energy debate entirely framed by the GOP. #

• Democratic Twitter FAIL: One thing is enormously clear -- Republicans are pwning Democrats when it comes to experimenting with Twitter as a governing/press tool. This has indeed been a campaign season when the eyes of the online left have been, very often, focused on the White House. And on the Democratic side, the '08 presidential race has been pretty conventional online. Does that leave Dems sputtering to catch up when Republicans are throwing all sorts of tech tools against the wall and seeing what sticks? Related: Ari Herzog has pulled together a wiki listing which members of Congress are on Twitter. But its accuracy depends on what your definition of "on" is. Senator Joe Biden's feed, for example, was last updated when he dropped out of the presidential race -- which was, if you weren't paying attention, more than seven months ago. #