The Web on the Candidates

• Patrick Ruffini wrote a great post asking if the influence of the netroots is waning. It's a response to Jerome Armstrong's post about Hillary Clinton's momentum and Barack Obama's failure to embrace or create a movement. Ruffini sees this as evidence that the netroots are losing power, and Clinton and Obama have correctly wagered that it's better to steer clear of them. "The fact remains that Obama's voters are not the netroots. Demographically, the netroots are older (45 is the median), whiter, and more academic. They are fairly conventional liberals and 'supervoters' — turning up in every general and most primaries. Obama's voters are not. Not only is Obama not talking to the netroots; like Hillary, he has made a calculation that he does not need the netroots."
• Although candidates must be on the web to be competitive, "it's not a substitute for politics as usual," writes Jill Lawrence at USA Today. Despite the overwhelming attention paid to the online work of campaigns, the ideal campaign still "combines online tools with television, direct mail, personal appearances and conventional fundraising," Lawrence writes. Michael Cornfield says that "candidates are learning to integrate the Internet with the face-to-face and the broadcast media so that everything is working together." Of course, we could argue that it's a good thing that working online isn't a substitute for "politics as usual"; isn't that the point, that it offers something new? And what the heck are "Remote Sensing Systems"?

The Candidates on the Web

• The Hillary Clinton campaign has launched it's own news aggregator site, called HillaryHub, that has the bare-bones look-and-feel of sites like the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post, with one crucial difference: all of the content is favorable to Hillary Clinton. It's a basic site with a giant Drudge-like photo and headline at the top, links to positive news reports running in two columns below, and links to favorable videos to the right. In a write-up in the Politico, Ben Smith says that "political campaigns are learning from corporate America and big-time sports, which increasingly produce and control their own news and entertainment." He talked to former Clinton White House spokesman and friend-of-Hillary Chris Lehane, who broadened the comparison to professional sports. "The professional sports are using their ability to control information and put it out on their terms, and using that to transcend the traditional press that covers them. The campaigns are going to do that more and more," Lehane said. (Thanks, Colin!)

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CNN and YouTube are inviting YouTube users to send in videos for the presidential debates, but they still need to fully open them up to the YouTube community.

Colin Delany picks apart at Joe Trippi's recent comments about the rise of authenticity in politics.