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Archive for the 'John Edwards' Category

John Edwards Among the Wikipedians

Published by William Beutler on July 29, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Beltway media, Breaking News, Edit Wars, Fox News, Google, John Edwards, Scandal and Wikipedia. 10 Comments

John Edwards’ Wikipedia article is locked until July 30.

Considering that my last two posts were more or less about non-coverage of the John Edwards kerfuffle and highly active Wikipedia articles, I can’t believe I’ve so far missed out on the controversy over what to do with said scandal on said politician’s entry on said reference website.

More than 26,000 words (!)* have been expended on the discussion page associated with the John Edwards encyclopedia entry since the National Enquirer posted a story claiming he was seen leaving a hotel room rented for Rielle Hunter (last week), the woman with whom they have alleged he fathered a child out of wedlock (last year). So far, there is no mention of this story in the article — let alone the existence of Ms. Hunter — and because it has been temporarily locked (see above), it doesn’t appear that anyone will. Not just yet, anyway.

I’ve now read about half the debate, which is the whole extent of it before new people start showing up and re-arguing old points. Based on my own knowledge of how Wikipedia works and what I’ve seen in the press, I’ve come to the conclusion that, even though it sure looks like Edwards’ goose is cooked, Wikipedia’s editors are currently doing the responsible thing by keeping it out of the article.

This post is longer than most, so I am tucking the length of it below the fold. If this subject interests you, follow me.

*When I started writing this post yesterday, it was 15,000. Another 11,000 words (!) went up overnight.

Update: This post was featured in a story by Sarah Stirland at Wired.com today, and points out, there are now a couple sentences about the controversy in the article. I left this comment on the story:

When the page came unlocked, it seems that Wikipedia editors previously uninvolved in the debate came onto the talk page, held a formal vote, and now it’s just a few sentences in the 2008 Presidential campaign section. Or it was until I changed it to “2008 presidential campaign” — a Manual of Style thing.

Continue reading ‘John Edwards Among the Wikipedians’

Blogger Rises to Top Job at Los Angeles Times!

Published by William Beutler on July 27, 2008 in John Edwards, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Newspapers, Scandal and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Today, the Times of London reports on the John Edwards sex scandal and the awkward non-coverage here in the states, and it includes at least one sentence that will be very amusing to the L.A. blogosphere:

Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Wow! Tony Pierce, longtime writer of Tony Pierce dot com + busblog and former editor of LAist, has risen all the way to become chief editor of the fourth-largest newspaper in the United States by reported circulation? That’s incredible!

It may sound credible, but it certainly is not creditable. Pierce is a web editor at the L.A. Times, overseeing about two dozen blogs on the latimes.com website. And except for the part about working for the Times, that sounds like a pretty good job by itself.

The Times of London simply omitted the conditional “an” before “editor,” giving an inflated impression of Pierce’s role. I thought maybe there was a difference between U.S. and U.K. English usage, but after clicking around google.co.uk, I’m pretty sure it’s just a mistake.

So who is editor of the Los Angeles Times? After all the turmoil at the newspaper these past few years, I had to look it up: Russ Stanton, a 10-year veteran of the paper, who was in fact a web editor himself.

So don’t count Pierce out yet. In the meantime, at least there are now thousands of people around the world who think that he is, in fact, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. Another reason why Pierce has a shot? He may have been punk at one time, but from what I’ve heard of the fallout, he’s been fairly humorless about it. I suggest Tony “Keep Rockin’” Pierce as an appropriate nickname.

P.P.S. This leaked follow-up memo from L.A. Times executive editor Meredith Artley gets it right the second time. That’s one memo too late, but it still should have been leaked more widely.

Four Blogs, Two Candidates and One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Daily Kos, Defections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Instapundit, John Edwards, John McCain, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Primary fights, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. Closed

Balloon Juice, The Daily Dish, MyDD and Taylor Marsh

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

  • In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
  • Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

  • In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
  • Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

  • At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
  • Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

John Edwards Was Born to Run

Published by William Beutler on January 30, 2008 in Barack Obama, E-mail, Fundraising, John Edwards, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and White House '08. 1 Comment

Here’s an e-mail from the John Edwards campaign sent Tuesday morning:

John Edwards’ last e-mail pitch

And here is what AP is reporting within the last hour:

Democrat John Edwards is exiting the presidential race Wednesday, ending a scrappy underdog bid in which he steered his rivals toward progressive ideals while grappling with family hardship that roused voters’ sympathies but never diverted his campaign, The Associated Press has learned.

The two-time White House candidate notified a close circle of senior advisers that he planned to make the announcement at a 1 p.m. EST event in New Orleans that had been billed as a speech on poverty, according to two of his advisers. The decision came after Edwards lost the four states to hold nominating contests so far to rivals who stole the spotlight from the beginning—Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The fundraising pitch bothered me plenty yesterday. Edwards presented himself throughout this campaign, as he did to some extent in 2003, as the populist reformer who would fight the big corporations on behalf of the little guy, whom only he represented. It’s not the kind of candidacy that attracts my interest, but it certainly has its place in Democratic politics.

That is, until several rounds of voting demonstrate that one does not in fact represent very many people. And yet here he was, the week following yet another epic fail, asking those same “little people” to throw their good, hard-earned money after his bad, weakening campaign. Today, he’s finally doing the right thing. But it bothers me even more that he was still trying to raise money less than 24 hours before throwing in the towel.

So why today? It is perhaps a clever partisan move to drop out on the same day Rudy Giuliani is withdrawing to back John McCain, and I respect the gamesmanship. But it also reminds me of Saturday evening, when his non-concession speech all but cut off Obama’s actual South Carolina victory speech. That’s John Edwards for you — a narcissist. So are most politicians, but he’s among the worst: He’s a narcissist who says he’s doing it all for you.

Joe Trippi and Twitter’s Second Life

Published by William Beutler on November 11, 2007 in Howard Dean, John Edwards, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

It’s too soon to tell whether Twitter will break on through to the mainstream side; it has long since reached critical mass in the tech community, but the politico adoption rate remains low, and the entertainment ’sphere barely knows it exists. Blogging took this path to becoming a household word, so it seems reasonable to assume it might happen that way again with microblogging.

This is not to say it necessarily will, but we can mark one point in favor: after three and a half months away, Joe Trippi is Twittering again.

When he first signed up in July, his tweets (as messages sent through Twitter are called) merely answered the ubiquitous question hovering above the input space:

What are you doing?

This is what he was doing:

Hanging out with Ted! 07:54 PM July 14, 2007 from web

Participating in Live Earth today — Help spread the word. 08:45 AM July 07, 2007 from web

watching movies with my son Ted! 07:48 PM July 04, 2007 from web

He dutifully answered a few times, and then like most political types who have tried, merely set it aside, gave up entirely or just didn’t get it.

Here are two basic points about using Twitter: One, your best tweets will not come while sitting at a desk — in order to be interesting to others, you have to be doing something, which means getting out of doors, and this tends to mean sending text messages from your cell phone to Twitter. Two, sometimes you should just ignore the inquest about your current activities and just use Twitter to say something.

As for Trippi, his November Twittering has been done almost exclusively via SMS. And he most certainly is much busier now than he was in July, Noam Scheiber detailed last week. Trippi joined the Edwards campaign as a mere add-on adviser in April, but in recent months he has apparently taken a lead strategic role. (For what it’s worth, John Edwards himself has been on Twitter since January — Matt Gross’ handiwork, I pesume.)

This recent burst of Trippi tweets are both a glimpse inside the manic campaign schedule and a glimpse inside the frazzled psyche of its owner. They’re on the edge. In the moment. They don’t appear calculated, are not especially guarded, and sometimes they make no sense at all. This is, after all, the man who nearly went blind due to low blood sugar on the trail in 2003, and whose tearful exit from Burlington was broadcast live on national cable news.

A few tweets offer a keyhole view of the campaign:

up late working on a youtube video for John Edwards that will be released later today. Released our first Iowa ad earlier today. 01:32 AM November 02, 2007 from txt

Just finished another day in iowa. This time I really do know I won’t be doing this again. But Edwards was good all day 02:06 AM November 05

Others detail the life of Trippi:

Exhausted but still going. Actually went out and played pinball til 1am with a NY Times reporter last night in Iowa City. Had a lot of f … … 03:13 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

Off to Cedar Rapids for Edwards. Its my 10th wedding anniversary. I am so screwed 10:55 AM November 08, 2007 from txt

And still others… who knows?

price today 03:13 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

Stars 08:55 PM November 05, 2007 from txt

It almost dares you to ponder what he was thinking at the time. For the record, my guesses: Staring out a train window at night, standing in the grocery checkout line watching the total rise. Some people would call this bad Twittering, certainly for its incomprehensibility, but I disagree — this is more interesting than using it as a distribution list or RSS feed receptacle (perfectly legitimate uses, by the way).

Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t drop it again just as quickly. An application like Twitter, which asks so little, is also easily forgotten. Twitter participation can be streaky, more so than blogs. Unless and until it develops into a full-blown next-generation instant messenger (my prediction) the site will remain erratic and insular. On the other hand, that’s why some of us pay attention in the first place.

P.S. Trippi isn’t the only person famous-within-his-respective-field to start tweeting again this month. Only Thursday, widely-heard tech podcaster Leo Laporte finally ran up the white flag:

I surrender Twitter. You win.

Laporte abandoned Twitter under entirely different circumstances. He ditched it for competing microblogging service Jaiku in April, citing fears of brand confusion. The flagship of Laporte’s podcast fleet is christened This Week in Tech, or TWiT for short. I assume he’ll explain in the next installment. Maybe there is hope yet that he will relent on the term podcasts, which he gave up for “netcasts,” which isn’t catching, and which I felt compelled to throw scare quotes around.

P.P.S. Aren’t you glad this post wasn’t actually about Second Life?

The CNN/Something Awful Debate

Published by William Beutler on August 17, 2007 in Academic Blogging, Asymmetrical Media, Barack Obama, CNN, Debates, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Message Boards, Seriously and Tech Blogosphere. 8 Comments

Inspired by the recent CNN/YouTube debate, today’s New York Times asked several media observers to imagine other ways in which the Web 2.0 world might influence presidential politics. I found Matt Bai’s suggestion particularly interesting:

Maybe someday soon the candidates will have laptop computers at their lecterns, and we’ll hang a giant screen behind the stage. Then, as one candidate is talking, the others will use instant messaging to create a kind of scrolling commentary and critique, and all the comments will appear overhead.

While John Edwards is decrying special interests, Bill Richardson might type: “Gee, John, what exactly would you call the trial lawyers?” Or Christopher Dodd might write: “Why is Kucinich still talking? LOL.”

It’s a neat idea. This year’s Personal Democracy Forum tried something similar, with audience members’ comments appearing on a screen behind the panelists. That worked all right, though it did distract from those onstage.

For a presidential debate then, the comments would indeed have to come from the candidates — not to mention, they need something to do while they wait five or ten minutes for their next turn.

And what if CNN teamed up with uber-message board Something Awful? Well, I believe it might look a little something like this:

Democratic Debate as co-sponsored by Something Awful

P.S. I also noticed that the Times titled Tom Brokaw’s contribution “Sip and Spin.” Now, I’m perfectly fine with potential presidents answering questions from snowmen, but if you know whence the phrase come — no, not the toy — well, isn’t that a little undignified?

Update: Something Awful has found this post. Of course, they don’t seem to care for it and even rescinded the initial link. But the poster did concede:

The picture is pretty much SA I guess.

And as you can see in the comments, this post has been blessed with one of the most sincere statements a latter-day message boarder can offer. Thanks, guys.

Updated again: Okay, the people on this SA board seemed to like it a bit more.

The One on the Right is on the Left

Published by William Beutler on August 16, 2007 in Entertainment, John Edwards, Oppo Research and RNC. 3 Comments

Almost a year ago, Blog P.I. called out a tone-deaf oppo docment from the RNC making a ham-fisted and easily-refuted argument against Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, and by extension the entire lefty netroots. Today U.S. News’ Washington Whispers points out another one, which is even worse.

This time they sought to draw attention to John Edwards’ high-rolling, high-spending ways (which every political reporter already knows about) with a mailer trying to sully John Edwards’ name by tying him to… Johnny Cash?

Seriously:

RNC mailer tags John Edwards as Johnny Cash

Unsurprisingly, Cash’s estate contacted the RNC (and presumably U.S. News) to ask that the Highwayman’s name be removed from future editions. So apparently now they’re calling him “Johnny Bills,” which doesn’t make any sense.

But it makes more sense than trying to drag down Johnny Cash’s name. At least an unidentified RNC official conceded the mistake to Washington Whispers:

We’re in a ring of fire. … They called us and said they had some issues with the trademarks and all. But they were cool about it. I mean, we have the same constituency.

Or maybe they thought associating Edwards with Cash would somehow… hurt Edwards? The connection between the two Johns is non-existent, except maybe that both their middle initials is “R.”

As a Johnny Cash fan, you can certainly count me as displeased with the RNC’s attempt to make “Johnny Cash” sound like a bad thing. And let’s not forget, this is the same guy who once sang, in the song whence this post derives its name:

Now this should be a lesson if you plan to start a folk group
Don’t go mixin’ politics with the folk songs of our land
Just work on harmony and diction
Play your banjo well
And if you have political convictions keep them to yourself

By all means, RNC, keep hitting John Edwards on his rhetoric and economic proposals. And his being out of touch with the electorate is fair game, too. But please, leave the Man in Black out of it.

Hillary’s Got Base

Published by Not Paul Begala on April 30, 2007 in Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Netroots, Polling, Primary fights and White House '08. 6 Comments

Chris Bowers of MyDD jump-started some of my thinking on whether or not Hillary vs. Obama poll numbers have any inherent biases built into them, but Mark Blumenthal ends that discussion here with some smart analysis that suggests there is no difference between national surveys of so-called Dem primary voters.

Bowers postulated that the screens were not tight enough and Hillary had a name ID advantage that was explaining her lead. I believed some version of that for a while as well, but those numbers suggest to me that something very different is happening in the Democratic primary race.

Look at the chart Blumenthal produces:

Hillary-Obama match-up from Mystery Pollster

That Mark Mellman poll piqued my interest.

One of the reason we hacks so trust our pollsters is they use better methods than the (cheap) traditional media outlets use. Mellman’s poll uses a registration-based screen with voter history as a leading indicator of primary participation. Translated into English: He bought a voter file and called people who vote in primaries. That’s significantly more expensive to do, but provides much more valuable information.

So, here’s your resident Dem hack’s analysis of those numbers.

Hillary Clinton has a big-time base of support. She has 38% of the electorate — an electorate that is closely watching this race so far and has not decided to leave her. Edwards and Obama both have 77% name ID in this poll to Clinton’s 96%. That’s low, but couldn’t possibly account for her entire lead, and let me quibble with one point of analysis from their own page:

…Obama and Edwards are more popular among Democratic primary voters who know them.

Yeah, no shit. Your supporters tend to know who you are. It’s a common misconception in polling analysis that the uniformed portion of a poll acts like the informed portion.

Either way, I would think the Obama and Edwards teams need to face a hard fact: primary Dems know Hillary and they’re sticking with her right now. They will need to start identifying ways to peel off those voters if they want to win.

38% of the vote in a six-way primary is a massive amount of support and I won’t even get into an analysis of HRC’s favorables in this poll (they’re good) because it would take me another three paragraphs I don’t feel like writing that much.

But… HRC hasn’t locked this up by any means. It’s significant that 62% of Dems choose someone else and when there are fewer candidates to choose from, they’ll undoubtedly consolidate.

But the media don’t report like that; they only crown winners. In a front-loaded primary, people who look like they’re going to win generally get votes. It won’t be hard for HRC to start rolling through if she can emerge from IA, NH, NV, SC with a couple wins.

That makes those states do or die for Edwards and Obama. They need to shake up Hillary’s base.

The Google Primary II: Buy Your Rivals

Published by William Beutler on April 9, 2007 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Google, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Campaigns, Rudy Giuliani and White House '08. 9 Comments

Yesterday I managed to get a whole post out of the observation that most, but not all, of the top tier candidates are buying up their own names on Google AdWords. In this post, I’ll try to get some mileage out of reporting something more interesting:

The candidates who are bidding for their own names on Google’s advertising program are also bidding on their opponents’ names.

To take one example, when you search for Mitt Romney on Google, one of the ads you’ll see in the AdWords column along the right-hand side will be for John McCain. So I ran searches for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, and then I compared the results. If the image below hurts your eyes to read, right-click on the image and open a larger version into another browser tab. Here’s what I found, in the order listed:

2008 presidential candidates on Google AdWords

When you run these searches, slightly different ads come up each time. It’s probably in Google’s interest to mix it up some, not to mention a number of advertisers may be bidding the same amount on some of these phrases. Therefore, the image above is only meant to give a general idea of what ads will appear. For example, since I Photoshopped that together last night, I’ve now seen a Giuliani ad appear in a Romney search. It isn’t reflected above, but it has been factored into this post.

Okay, but who all bought who? Here’s whose name/keyword was bought by whom — keyword, then campaigns:

Clinton
Obama
Giuliani		 Romney
McCain
Giuliani		 Giuliani
McCain		 McCain
Romney
Giuliani

If you’d rather see who bought whose name as a keyword, try this on for size — campaign, then keywords:

Obama
Clinton		 Romney
McCain
Giuliani 		Giuliani
Hillary

McCain
Romney		 McCain
Giuliani

You can probably do all the same armchair analysis here that I can. Obama’s camp believes he can win over Hillary Clinton people (supporters, or those interested enough to Google her name), Romney’s team hopes to win over McCain people, McCain aims to pull support from both his GOP rivals, and the Giuliani squad is on a comparative buying spree, to the point of wooing some Hillary supporters. For some reason, nobody is bidding on either Edwards or Obama.

Meanwhile, in a post seemingly anticipating this one, Oregon Dem consultant Kari Chisholm observed:

The point of a Google ad isn’t to find people who know they’re looking for you — they should be able to find you just fine. It’s to find people who are looking for something else; and your candidate is the answer to their question. This will work even better for the second-tier candidates who aren’t getting much media attention.

I didn’t find any second-tier candidates bidding on the top-tier names, but he’s right: They should be. I also didn’t venture any further than the top six candidates as generally agreed upon by looking at polls, fundraising and what how the Washington Post/New York Times axis treats the various contenders. Another mini-study such as this might turn up some interesting results for other candidates, and other phrases that on which campaigns have bid.

Additionally, election campaigns are not the only customers bidding for higher-placed ads on Google AdWords — they are joined by various for- and not for-profit enterprises, who seek to associate their products and programs with the candidates listed. Here’s what I found, based on the screen caps taken on Saturday night:

  • YouTube — that is, Google — bought everybody. They also bid the most. Hmmm.
  • The Pew Forum, not (yet) owned by Google, was the only other website/organization to bid, and bid high on the words.
  • The Center for American Progress’ Campus Progress bought Obama, and Obama only.
  • Something called Ascend Alliance — which appears to be a student exchange program without the students — has bought Romney, but no one else.
  • The do-gooders do seem to like Romney: the One campaign claims “Romney wears ONE band.” The ONE blog provides evidence, although it could simply be that he held one in his hand.
  • Human Events bought Giuliani and more curiously, Obama as well.
  • Cringe-inducing pro-voting groups have attached themselves to Edwards (generationengage.org), Rudy (declareyourself.org) and Romney (megadittoes).
  • Moviefone and Tickets-for-Events.com are both betting that people mistake John Edwards for John Edward of “Crossing Over” fame (or “fame”).
  • Hillary, Obama, Edwards and Romney all have obviously for-profit concerns bidding on their words — selling buttons and T-shirts, mostly — perhaps saying less about how well they think those candidates will sell than about how the others will not. The market has spoken — and Republicans aren’t moving units so well these days.
  • Hillary, Obama and Romney are all popular enough as keywords that a link at the bottom of their columns will take you to more ads, if you wish.
  • Trouble for Romney: one of the websites bidding on his name is ConservativesAgainstRomney.com. Lucky for Giuliani, sister site ConservativesAgainstRudy.com does not appear to be bidding on his name.
  • On the other hand, the Conservative Book Club appears to have bid on Romney and Romney only, so he should be reassured that not all conservatives are against him.

Anything I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Credit where it’s due: Jeff Jarvis had this idea last week, although we went about it in different ways. Meanwhile, Kate Kaye at the ClickZ News Blog decided to see which candidates had bid on certain issue-related keywords:

iraq war, troop surge, social security, poverty, global warming, climate change, new hampshire, homeland security, terrorism, immigration, us attorneys, alberto gonzales, iran, iran nuclear, nuclear weapons, china trade, trade deficit, wmd, afghanistan, pelosi syria, british sailors, retirement, gay rights, women rights, feminism, labor rights, minimum wage, living wage, abortion, pro life, roe v wade, draft, military draft

So who bought those key words? Apparently none of them.

The Google Primary I: Paying, Or Not Playing

Published by William Beutler on April 8, 2007 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Google, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Campaigns, Rudy Giuliani, Second Life and White House '08. 4 Comments

Considering that Google controls just about half of the market for search in the U.S., that Google estimates its advertising network reaches 80% of U.S. Internet users, and that their program is extremely flexible, any political campaign should think strongly about using them. And even though pay-per-click ads are not without risk, this should be all the more true for a presidential campaign.

I’m working on a longer post looking at the 2008 candidates’ use of Google AdWords, but in the meantime, let’s first see who is playing and how they’re playing. Counting only the top six contenders from both parties, here’s what each campaign wants you to see at the top of a Google search results when you search for their name:

Giuliani's Google Sponsored Link

John McCain's Google Sponsored Link

Mitt Romney's Google Sponsored Link

Hillary Clinton's Google Sponsored Link

Barack Obama's Google Sponsored Link

John Edwards' Google Sponsored Link

Hillary has incorporated Blogads into her online strategy and Edwards has been running an online campaign since early 2005, yet neither have bothered to make sure their campaign sites are the top result on Google. (Of course, Google News results do appear beneath the Sponsored Links for the others, but I have cropped them out.) Although Democrats have rushed into Second Life and other brave new worlds, apparently two of their top contenders are ignoring plain old Google.

A few other findings, based on tedious reloading of the same searches, over and over:

  • Obama is indeed playing, but he’s not all in. His ad displays less than half the time — so if you don’t see it, hit reload.
  • For all three Republicans, their Sponsored Link appears almost every time, but not quite.
  • McCain has three different versions of his ad in rotation. Key phrases: “Learn More” and “Sign Up.”
  • Romney also has three versions rotating. Key phrases: “Build a New American Dream” and “Strong. New. Leadership.”
  • Giuliani has just the one pictured above.

More later. Stay tuned.