benmurray / washington d.c.

David Brooks on Sarah Palin

From an online discussion yesterday with Gail Collins:

She is not going to be the leader of any party and doesn’t seem to be inclined in that direction.

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is a media psychodrama and nothing more. It gives people on each side an excuse to vent about personality traits they despise, but it has nothing to do with government.

She is in 2010 what Jerry Falwell was from the mid-1990s until his death — a conservative cartoon inflated by media. Evangelicals used to say that Falwell had three main constituency groups — ABC, CBS and NBC.

Source: New York Times via Andrew Sullivan

I love graphics

Even if they’re a little misleading.

Chart: Obama for America
Data: U.S. Department of Labor

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Making Videos Longer

When creating advocacy videos for YouTube or other electronic media, the general rule is to make it shorter than 5 minutes. Even better is 3 minutes. Then, why is Barack Obama’s campaign churning out 20 minute videos? Because people are watching them.

Link to video

Body of War

I attended the Reel Progress screening of the new documentary “Body of War” last night at the E-Street Cinema.  It’s the tale of Tomas Young, a soldier transitioning from a wounded Iraq War vet coping with his injuries to a vocal critic of the war.  Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro directed the brilliant, personal look into his life, marriage, injuries and activism.  Eddie Vedder wrote two moving songs that perfectly fit the film’s tone.

Where most documentaries would shy away from personal tales about recovery like relations with his wife, catheters, erections, etc., this film takes in stride.  It isn’t about numbers or figures, talking heads or political motivations.  It’s just a look into one soldier’s life and his quest to find voice in ending the way and bringing his fellow servicemen and women home.

Tomas was there last night, along with Sen. Byrd, Phil Donahue, Ellen Spiro, Ralph Nader and other personalities.  Byrd was featured throughout the film as one of the most critical of the war.  His vibrant orations were a perfect fit to juxtapose the talking points from the White House.  He didn’t refrain from throwing a few fists and yells during the screening either, even if his oratory is a little quiet these days.

It’s opening to the public in Washington this Friday, April 4th.  Don’t miss it.

Linestanders Move to Boston

On Monday, in Cambridge, the FCC held a hearing on accusations that Comcast is restricting bandwidth in certain sections of its network. Comcast was there to argue that major ISPs should be able to play “traffic cop” on the Internet.

Obviously, this isn’t very popular among the masses (the AG in NY has subpoenaed them). So, to make sure the public couldn’t express their concern, Comcast essentially bought up all the seats with snoozing line-standers.

Paying people to stand in line in Washington is certainly not new. But, when Comcast uses the line-standers to completely block out the public, it’s a gross misuse of what is normally an acceptable practice.

To bring light to this attack on public access to the hearing, savetheinternet.com created a fantastic video that perfectly represents their argument. It is short, peppy and informative. It contains exactly the pieces of information necessary for those that did and didn’t know about the hearing, and gives you the opportunity to act once you’ve seen it. Well done. It’s probably the first YouTube video to ever get over 12,000 views in one day with the main subject being the FCC.

Hillary Wakes Up to Facebook

In what could be called the slowest response to the Facebook community yet, Hillary Clinton finally got her own Facebook application today, 6 days before what is arguably her most critical step in the primaries…and it’s not even from the campaign.

The “Go Hillary” application is designed to unite Hillary supporters, recruit them to sign up more supporters, contribute, make calls, host events and compete with each other for points based on their activism.  Unfortunately, the application is probably too late to have any real impact on the primaries.

Obama has over 640,000 supporters on Facebook, while Clinton pulls in 125,000.  The lack of support could be a result of low youth support in general, but is no doubt aided by the lack of opportunities to funnel the youth support online.  Obama’s application has a Digg-like rating system of news, videos and other Obama tidbits.  It also places a nice box on supporters’ profiles indicating their support of the candidate.  Clinton’s doesn’t appear to do any such thing, at least for this user.

In this case, once again, Obama is the Mac and Clinton the PC.  Too bad, for such a great candidate.

via techPresident

Clinton Injects $5M, Obama Matches in Donations

Hillary Clinton announced today that she is loaning her presidential campaign $5 million of her own money. Barack Obama responded with his own campaign – to raise the same $5 million in individual contributions. Looks like he’ll do it in about one day. I pulled this graphic from the email his campaign manager sent this evening asking donors to match her loan.

Now, it may seem like he’s kicking her while she’s down, but the huge headlines declaring that Hillary’s campaign coffers are running dry and that her campaign staff is now searching through trash bins seems a bit a over-the-top. She’ll make the money back quickly in contributions and power through March.

But, it is, as always, a fascinating look at how the Internet has driven these campaigns. Obama raised $32 million in January, taking $28 million of it online. That’s 87% of his fundraising for the month. The reach of his campaign and the number of small donors this online system can engage is staggering. With PayPal, Google Checkout and other ready-made online checkout systems, contributors needn’t even get out their checkbooks.

Maybe Just Ban the Paultards

Astute Wonkette commenters picked up on a recent gem from the Ron Paul forums.

“Does anyone fear that the internet will be attempted to be taken away from us because of the “threat” RP and we have posed? Assuming Paul doesn’t become President, the people “in charge” will have to know that we are all fired up and organizing on the internet for the long haul to make sure the Constitutional candidate in 4 years does win.. I fear they will try to take the internet away, somehow, and then it will be back to hitting the streets, which isn’t bad, but you get my point…”

Yep, I get your point, and think it’s a pretty good idea. Who is it exactly that is “in charge?”

via Wonkette
The Ron Paul Forums 

Obama Capitalizes on Will.i.am’s Creation

A great example of a campaign capitalizing on the creativity of its supports comes in the form of Will.i.am’s music video remix of Barack Obama’s victory speech in the South Carolina primary. The video, released Friday by the creators, was emailed to the campaign by Michelle Obama Monday night.

It has over 2 million views (at last count of the several iterations floating around) and continues to spread. It’s a catchy, moving creation from talented artists that equate Obama’s speech and message with song and lyrics.

What is great for the campaign is that the saw the quality of the video, the positive response and the potential for their polling numbers. They sent the video around, being sure to note that it was a “supporter created video,” and sat back to watch the latest viral video take even further flight. Well done, BO.