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The First E-President
Szentigrade writes "Popular Science is running a letter by Daniel Engber of the online Slate Magazine in which he offers the US Presidential nominees advice on using the full potential of the Internet upon their election into office. Some examples discussed in the letter include: a project already being developed that speeds up the patent approval process, a UK site that aims to improve government-citizen interactions, and perhaps most importantly, a call for government information to be 'presented in a standardized and widely used data format, like XML, so that anyone — in or out of government — could use and reconfigure it however they pleased.' Will 2009 be the first year of the E-President?"
in previous elections, grassroots fundraising was small time. dean certainly created buzz in 2004, and $, on the internet, but by far, obama has shown that internet fundraising is a tsunami. it dwarfs the old-boy network and other sources of funding
i think a lot of us lament the influence of money in american democracy. but i think this is the first election you would ever have republicans siding with that sentiment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In many ways, it's You Tube that's killed the Republican coalition between fiscal conservatives (libertarians), social conservatives, and the "National Greatness" conservatives (the neo-cons, more or less.)
Obama's campaign helped the Republicans self-destruct by aggressively running a 50-state campaign, not a 50% +1 campaign. This meant that the RNC had to run ads to shore up its base in formerly secure red states. The problem is, the message that rallies the base - using "liberal" as a smear word, attacking patriotism, etc - alienates the middle. An ad attacking the Democrats in North Carolina will be seen by voters in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and they will find it repellent. Meanwhile, Obama does not have to appeal to the far left to mobilize his base, and his base is already extremely well mobilized. He is more or less in a situation where he never has to apologize or be sheepish about any ad with "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message" on it, while a lot of the John McCain ads are frankly embarrassing.
The result is Republican meltdown. Fiscal conservatives already suspect that it may be easier, as in the Clinton era, to get fiscally conservative policy out of a Dem administration than out of the Republicans. It's definitely easier to push fiscal conservatism in the Democratic party than it is to push social liberalism in the Republican one. Now, the tensions between the generally secular neo-cons and the religious social conservatives (many of whom, like Huckabee, are actually comfortable with a government that provides a lot of services) is being reflected in the cracks between McCain's camp and Palin's camp.
I think what YouTube has done is put an asterisk next to Tip O'Neill's old axiom that "all politics are local." That asterisk is "but all communications are global."