http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/n...ns/16312242.htm

Posted on Sun, Dec. 24, 2006

Candidates turn to Web to reach voters
PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press


WASHINGTON - Al Gore claimed he invented it. John McCain predicted it would revolutionize political campaigning. Howard Dean made it pay - and then some.

Ah, the Internet.

As candidates prepare for the 2008 presidential campaign, the Internet is the new Main Street. An estimated 70 percent of adults in the United States travel the digital highway, still a cheap and largely unregulated medium.

Reaching those potential voters and donors has become an important part of modern politicking. Candidates aggressively compete for the talents of the most creative geeks in politics and develop new ways to exploit the Net.

Republicans have mastered e-mail as the new form of direct-mail campaigns, raising money and pushing a GOP message. Democrats have excelled at raising cash through small-scale donations and making the Net their version of talk radio.

"You have an inexpensive way to have a conversation with people with the propensity to turn out and vote," said Rick Davis, a McCain adviser who managed the Arizona Republican's 2000 presidential campaign.

In that race, McCain predicted that "in the next few years the Internet will completely turn political campaigns upside down."

McCain, the potential front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination, is among the most tech-savvy could-be White House candidates today. He has retained many hands from his 2000 bid and has recruited some of the top names in online campaigning.

The model for many presidential wannabes is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. True, Dean was soundly defeated in his race for the 2004 Democratic nomination. But his campaign relied on the Internet to raise an enviable $53 million; more than 60 percent of donors gave less than $200 each.

Lesson learned, potential 2008 campaigns say.

Former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the first major candidate to do podcasts when he was running for president in 2004, has recruited Dean's Internet communications director.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads the Democratic pack of prospective candidates, hired a pair of online writers for her successful Senate re-election campaign this year and has amassed an e-mailing list.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is quickly building his own mailing list and using others' lists to raise campaign cash. He raised $800,000 for Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., this year using a MoveOn.org list.

But the recognized Democratic leader when it comes to the Internet is Sen. John Kerry, his party's 2004 nominee. He has a 3 million-plus e-mail list of supporters, donors and activists.

The Massachusetts senator sent e-mails to supporters more than 300 times between Election Day 2004 and Election Day 2006. He also has used his campaign apparatus to give away $14 million in donations to candidates last cycle. During a two-day period this year, he used his e-mail contacts to raise $900,000 for four Senate candidates.

"This represents the community of activists," said David Thorne, who organized Kerry's 2004 Web strategy and remains an adviser. "These are people who want to be active and supportive of progressive causes. There was no more important progressive cause than getting Bush out of the White House in '04."

Without a major polarizing figure among Republicans in 2008, Thorne doubts Democrats could recreate their Web success.

"I am dubious anyone can build the same kind of list in '08," Thorne said. "There won't be anyone that will create the passion and the intensity that George Bush did in '04."

Among Republicans, the enemy is Sen. Clinton. Anti-Clinton Web sites are popping up on the Internet even though Clinton has not announced she is running.

One site, StopHerNow.com, is devoted to "rescuing America from the radical ideas of Hillary Clinton." Its financial backer is a donor to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a potential GOP candidate.

"It's an oldie. It's just not golden," said Ann Lewis, Clinton's Senate campaign communications director. "We've never doubted there are people on the other side who will try (to use the Web against us). The Web gives you an ability to respond quickly."

If past is prologue, Clinton will do more than play defense. The Web talent for her Senate campaign included Salon.com's Peter Daou, blogger Jesse Berney and former Democratic National Committee grassroots director Nancy Eiring.

"The way to look at what we might do is what we just finished doing," Lewis said.

Mike Connell, who ran President Bush's Web strategy in 2000 and 2004, said campaigns still do not spend enough on online efforts despite the obvious returns.

"Too many dollars are being wasted on traditional broadcast advertising," he said. "It used to be three major broadcast networks ... Now we've got an entirely fragmented market, people spread across the entire spectrum of content."

Campaigns are eager to substitute online video for a broadcast version.

"Clearly online video is rapidly chewing away at traditional TV time," said Nikko Mele, Dean's campaign webmaster from 2004. "We are taking time usually spent watching television and watching the Web. It's not clear how campaigns are going to take advantage of that."

The heaviest users of the online video are people age 18-34, according to an Associated Press-AOL poll from this summer. It is an age group with a low, not high, voter turnout record. Also people in this group generally do not give major donations to campaign. But they are the ones who can create a buzz.

"Every trend that existed four years ago exists double-so, triple-so now," Mele said. "There is plenty of opportunity online. It's going to require innovation, risk taking."

Aren't we all glad Al Gore invented the internet.

Maybe it was it was a long range secret project to finaly get himself elected.

The man's a genius, but I wonder why he invented global warming...hmmm?

Townie, yer an ignorant Bushbot stooge.


http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm

Inventing the Internet
Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?


What's the real story behind Al Gore Inventing the Internet?
Bush runs commercials mocking Al Gore saying the he claims to have invented the Internet. Bush claims Gore is a liar and that he can't be trusted. Here's the story behind the story and you determine who is lying and who is telling the truth.

The following is a terrific article written by Mountain Democrat columnist David Jacobsen.



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The Issue is Trust
Let's say the Associated Press or Time Magazine wants to consider me for a job. I'd have to whisk together a resume that might include the following: "My column appears regularly on the award-winning editorial page of the Mountain Democrat."

Of course, I had nothing to do with winning the award, earned by Editor Michael Raffety. He did, though, let me park on his illustrious page. So nobody could fault me for basking in his reflected glory.

Unless, of course, I were running for president.

Exhibit A is Al Gore. People eager to lie about him continue to portray him as a liar. First lie, that he claims to have "invented" the Internet. Second lie, that he claims to have "discovered" the pollution of Love Canal. Third lie, that he falsely claims to be the model for Oliver Barrett IV, hero of Love Story.

Gore never claimed that he "invented" the Internet, which implies that he engineered the technology. The invention occurred in the seventies and allowed scientists in the Defense Department to communicate with each other. In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Taken in context, the sentence, despite some initial ambiguity, means that as a congressman Gore promoted the system we enjoy today, not that he could patent the science, though that's how the quotation has been manipulated. Hence the disingenuous substitution of "inventing" for the actual language.

For a heady while we hoped that the Bush campaign would prove their man to be the champion of honesty and integrity that he pretends to be, especially for those looking for a squeaky clean new White House. A couple of weeks ago the campaign rejected a shoddy commercial showing Gore saying that Clinton never told a lie. Problem was that the clip showed an interview from 1994, long before Clinton ever heard of Monica Lewinsky.

To his credit, Bush scrapped the commercial before it aired. But as I write, his campaign is unloading a new commercial, featuring a sneer at the fragment from the Internet claim, again implying that Gore had nothing to do with the Internet's creation. At least they got the words right; it would be dangerous to doctor the tape.

But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."

The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."

Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"

The Love Canal canard distorts a story Gore told to a high school class in Concord, New Hampshire. In answer to a question about how students could get involved in politics, Gore described a letter he'd received from a girl in West Tennessee while he was a congressman. Based on the girl's complaint about a poisoned well, he organized an investigation, which in turn led to other pollution sites, culminating in the expose of Love Canal. Referring to the well in Toone, Tennessee, Gore said, "That was the one you didn't hear of--but that was the one that started it all."

The media was quick to misquote the line as "I was the one that started it all." Seemingly dissatisfied with Gore's style, the Republican National Committee improved the line thus: "I was the one who started it all." When the Concord Monitor and the Boston Globe exposed what had really been said in that high school class, the New York Times, the Washington Post and U.S. News offered grudging corrections of their reportorial errors.

Some of the media's stars had rare fun with the idea that Al Gore was the kernel for Ryan O'Neal's most famous role; but no one seemed interested in finding out whether Gore was telling the truth or not. CNBC's Chris Matthews chortled. "It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron." But in this case Snoopy really is the Red Baron. Erich Segal, author of Love Story, corroborated that Gore and his Harvard roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, were indeed the models for the story's main character.

Given that Gore was telling the truth, what's the issue? We have an odd bit of trivia of no relevance to the election--except to those liars who want to portray Gore as a liar.

All of these malicious whoppers have been exposed for over a year and have received pusillanimous apologies, often mean-spirited and grudging, from the so-called "liberal" press that promoted them. But like a corrupting disease the lies simply refuse to go away.

Unless Bush gets out of the tank with the media bottom feeders, he's not going to make it, especially in an election revolving around honesty and integrity.



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So, it would appear that Bush is the one lying and can't be trusted.
If it wasn't for Al Gore, you might not be reading this web page right now.