The Web on the Candidates

• Over at OpenLeft, Matt Stoller picks up on a theme first articulated by Jeff Cohen last week, about how the netroots have not organized their energies to stop a Hillary Clinton nomination (although Stoller follows very closely some of Cohen's points, he curiously doesn't mention Cohen's piece at all). Stoller thinks the only way to combat Clinton is for the netroots to organize around the idea of fully withdrawing the troops from Iraq. "So our efforts right now should be organized around getting that candidate in the race, or convincing a current candidate to take that position," rather than make backroom deals convincing John Edwards or Barack Obama to drop out.
• Stoller has also been playing with a new widget from Rock the Vote which makes it easy for anyone to register voters on their site. He calls it "a kind of like Actblue for voter registration," since it can help individual activists create voter registration programs. They can then collect the contact information from the registrants, which could be leveraged against candidates on election day ("'hey, 1834 voters, including 23 in your district', registered to vote through this site. You ought to listen to their concerns."). There's huge potential here.
• Speaking of Rock the Vote, TechRepublican's James Durbin noticed that it's entirely sponsored by liberal groups. "We've given up on MTV and their viewers and then blame it on the youth when they don't understand the conservative message... If we're serious about combatting the liberal message, web-savvy conservative organizations have to get in the game," he writes.

The Candidates on the Web

• Fred Thompson recently bandied about the idea, first suggested by Newt Gingrich, of holding Lincoln-Douglas-style debates instead of the eight- or nine-person advertising filler debates that are currently held. Mike Huckabee picked up on the idea and has challenged Thompson to a two-man debate. Huckabee posted the letter he sent to Thompson on his website, putting the ball in the Tennessean's hands and asking his supporters to co-sign the letter by leaving a comment. As of this writing, there were nearly 1400 comments below the letter, a testament to peoples' frustration with the current debate format and perhaps Huckabee's gathering strength.

In Case You Missed It...

After last night's Spanish-language Univision Democratic debate, Micah Sifry went looking for Spanish-language political discussions online about it, and didn't find much.

Patrick Ruffini finds that, contrary to public opinion, Republicans aren't inherently afraid of the web. Witness the surge in traffic to Fred08.com the day Fred Thompson announced.

Jeff Commaroto responds to a conversation that followed his post on the worth of campaign bloggers.