McCain Campaign Offers Rewards For Turn-Key Comments

According to a story at the Washington Post, John McCain's presidential campaign is offering more than moral suasion to fire people up for a McCain presidency; they're also offering ready-made snippets of rhetoric for interested supporters to supply under their own names in public comments to online news sources and forums. Such pre-written commentary by itself is neither new nor necessarily nefarious, but it seems a bit off-kilter that prolific commenters are eligible for rewards — not just campaign swag like hats and stickers, but higher-ticket items like a ride with McCain on his campaign bus. Probably a script could be whipped up to compare the canned suggestions on the site with "grassroots" comments on political news sites around the web.

Comments

Re:Am I missing something?

[Abcd1234]

Did you miss the Today's Talking Points links? Or did you actively ignore them?

It's not about copy-paste

[tobiah]

I think you're right that McCain's site isn't suggesting they copy and paste the comments. The issue here is the rewards system, and perhaps the blog-targetting (specific blogs are listed for users to comment in).
The WP article has some good feedback from politicos on the problems with this approach and possible solutions. In particular that the bloggers should be advised to use full disclosure ("I am a McCain action alert participant") and make sure their posts are relevant to the conversation.

Re:It seems to me

[bckrispi]

It's more that they haven't grasped the full implications of things like YouTube.

They should've learned this lesson two years ago. In 2005, Virginia Senator George Allen was the presumptive presidential front runner for the 2008 election. All it took was one viral video of him saying Macacca to tip his reelection bid to Jim Webb. One video cost him his senate seat, as well as a stab at the White House.