HillaryHub is a start at having an outreach portal by a Presidential candidate. All news and information about Hillary from the web. It's nothing all that great but at least its a sign-of-life-in-outreach on their website; and a bit of strength in recognition that some of the posts they are linking out to contain criticism of Clinton in the posts and comments.
The community on Edwards blog is probably the most populated. To their credit, the bloggers on the site have their own dialogue happening with the blogosphere, as evidenced by a recent post by Darrin Barringer, the campaigns Field Director, Getting the Scoop From State Blogs, but the non-political social networking sites get a lot more presence than the political blogosphere does on their website.
There's nothing happening in the way of outreach to Democratic-leaning blogs on Barack Obama's website that I can see. Nothing. It's a neat closed-walled website out of 2003 with fancier appliances. It says, 'we are doing this alone' at best, or 'you don't exist' to the netroots blogosphere on the left--but don't fret, you do get-have a unique number on Barack Obama's ever-expanding list.
Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson are getting there. Dodd's squad does a regular What They're Saying feature on their blog, and has well integrated getting staffers posting onto their blog. Richardson as well has a regular roundup, and seems to be the only candidate that actually has a blogroll.
That latter point is sorta striking, it's almost as if the candidate websites are afraid of associating with the netroots too closely, or in the case of Obama, at all. Perhaps they view the netroots blogosphere on the Democratic side as an entity to compete with, instead of cooperate with, for winning. Or maybe it's just that they are afraid of being associated with the partisanship and wild west of the online progressive movement. That's a sign of weakness on the behalf of our candidates, so Clinton's is a positive step in the right direction.
For the sake of comparison, I've been following the French elections a bit, and the amount of outreach being done by the Royal campaign seems impressive. Integrating google maps into their events; their vlog, and Segoland. I don't read french, but the latter looks like a blogosphere map of the supporting blogs throughout the nation, with a lot of participatory action looking like it's happening.
Among our top-tier, it's becoming impossible to imagine Obama doing anything of the sort in order to form a partisan alliance that he would need to win in 2008, but that Clinton or Edwards are at least moving in that direction.
I know there are Obama fans here who feel the need to come in defense of their candidate. That's fine. I find his non-existent online outreach strategy very pre-2003, and you are free to defend it. Just don't mimic the latest about how Obama is the new Reagan, because the latter knew how to work with his base.
|
|
|
Permalink :: 131 Comments :: Post a Comment
|
In order to post a comment, you must be logged in. If you have a member account, please log in to comment.
If not, you can make an account right here. It's quick and free.
