Online Media Cultist

If you’re a fan of politics, this year is a gift. After a long and hard fought primary season on the Democratic side, we finally have our general election showdown between Barack Obama and John McCain gearing up.

The Internet is playing a part in national politics like never before. The Howard Dean online phenomenon, the new netroots, Daily Kos, Drudge Report, the Swift Boat video guys, and even YouTube are all “ancient history” in the lightning-speed medium of the internets.

It’s fascinating to take a look at how the online play/battleground is being utilized at this first stage of the 2008 general election.

* Fight the Smears - ABC News’ The Note notes:

Time’s Karen Tumulty has the details: “The Obama campaign has built what might best be described as a Web-based rumor clearinghouse, located at fightthesmears.com, in which it hopes all the shady stories about Obama’s faith, his family and his rumored connections with controversial figures can go to die,” she writes. “Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters to help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut.”

Conventional wisdom holds in the wake of John Kerry’s 2004 loss to George W. Bush that attacks – no matter how half-baked – must be returned quickly and fiercely and with as much return fire as possible. That’s the legacy of the Swift Boat video that was used against Kerry, and Obama is crushing any suspicion that his “new kind of politics” is going to sit idly by for attacks against him personally or his stated positions.

(Wonder how the Obama campaign will react to Michelle Obama being called “Obama’s baby mama” on Fox News yesterday?)

* My.BarackObama.com - The Obama campaign has a fully functional and battle-ready social media platform up and running, replete with an Obama HQ Blog and any number of ways to get informed and involved in the campaign. techPresident points out that the social networking features on the site are rather weak, but that the groups and fund raising elements are the strongest touches. That makes sense, however, as those are the points that you would think a campaign-based social media site would most want to emphasize.

* Twitter - Barack Obama has nearly 40,000 followers on Twitter. Whoever is penning the tweets – Obama or more likely a staff member – knows how to write for the Twitter audience, with tweets such as “Thanking Hillary. Our party & our country are stronger because of the work she has done” and “In North Las Vegas. Addressed our housing crisis. In Las Vegas, 1 out of every 44 households is facing foreclosure. It is time for a change.”

* Notice a trend here? - Obama outlasted Hillary Clinton over the course of a long and sometimes brutal campaign by being highly organized and in part by wisely using the web for organizing, communicating, and fund raising. And that’s carrying over neatly to the general campaign.

* And what of McCain? - McCain’s age and to an extent his admitted lack of tech savvy are issues in this campaign. A Daily Kos piece called McCain and Technology, Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century, are only the beginning of what we’re going to see over the next five months. Kos links to an earlier story where Atrios is quoted:

I think in 2008 computer use and understanding of the internet should be part of the basic skill set we expect from people in positions of prominent public leadership. It’s pretty much impossible to have any kind of understanding of how people in the modern world go about their lives and work without that. The internet is not a fad or the playground for 17 year olds.

* John McCain 2008 - To be fair, the McCain campaign has an online home of its own, also replete with a blog and news and other features. Still, it has an older feel to it in terms of current online standards. To contrast, I’m drawn to a section on My.BarackObama.com called Obama Everywhere, which links out to an Obama campaign presence on Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, MiGente, BlackPlanet, AsianAve and a number of other social media sites.

* Rocking the viral vote - Online video is more important than ever this time around. And we’re seeing more video, better produced video, and in many cases better quality video than we have in the past. Comedy and satire are a big part of the mix these days. For example, techPresident points out what might be the “first viral video of the 2008 Presidential elections”:

These are all but indications and trends heading into what will no doubt be a surprising and exciting general election season. New lessons, new standards, and new tactics in the online components of the political game will be taken from the next five months and applied to future campaigns.

Any thoughts on what we’ll see next? Please fire away in the comments!

Now that the Democratic nomination has come to a close with Tuesday’s final primaries and news that Hillary Clinton will (finally!) concede to Barack Obama on Saturday, the general election interactive maps pitting Obama against Republican nominee John McCain are popping out all over the place.

Some sites, like Election Projection, keep it pretty simple. However, clicking each state takes you to a drilldown page with details and statistics specific to each state. For example, we learn about Colorado: “Colorado is the 27th most conservative state, voting 2.2% more Republican in the 2004 presidential elections than the national average.”

The Election 2008 site, featuring “Presidential, Senate and House Races Updated Daily” does an excellent job of displaying number of electoral votes, which way the state is leaning (Weak GOP, Strong Dem, and so on), current polling information by state, and historical results by state dating back to the 1992 presidential election.

I’m a sucker for these kinds of stats. For example, I love being able to analyze a state like Kentucky, where we see that Bill Clinton won the state by four points in 1992, squeaked by Dole in the state by just one point in 1996, but then the state turned bright red with strong victories by George W. Bush over both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

FiveThirtyEight.com throws a kitchen sink’s worth of maps, stats, and charts into the mix. Compare Obama vs. McCain against Clinton vs. McCain cartograms, for instance, to look at the relative strengths of candidates in states while getting a visual on how many electoral votes states possess.

It would be nice if some of these maps were embeddable, so that people could post them wherever they liked. It’s possible that some sites are doing this, but I’ve yet to come across an example.

This year’s presidential election will see a new level of involvement and innovation on the web, and things are just kicking into high gear. Any thoughts on new things that we’ll see on the web this election cycle? Please comment away!