Email as a campaign stratagy

I received an email bashing Hillary Clinton. Was it sent as a part of another candidate's campaign? Or just an enthusiastic activist? I am guessing any candidate will try to distance himself from this type of messaging.
Here's the email...
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This is beautiful!



Subject: Quarterback For The Packers!!!

In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for
the Packers this coming Sunday. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be
starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while
he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time she became
familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely
comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense.



A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.


Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you? Well, Hillary Clinton
makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of
Democrats polled agreed.



She has never run a City, County, or State. When told Hillary Clinton has
experience because she has 8 years in the White House, Dick Morris stated
'so has the pastry chef'.




----- End forwarded message -----

A FEW INTERESTING SITES TO LOOK AT

So if you don't know my personality by now then it's your loss, but I absolutely love humor. The past four years with Bush in office has certainly been "entertaining" for me, looking up some of his more "intellectual" speeches throughout his presidency. Most recently (for those who haven't heard) was his speech he gave to the troops this past week while on his trip to Isreal. If you haven't seen it and need a quick laugh, definately check it out :)

Another fun thing to check out if you have some time is:

www.crackle.com.

It should open up to a video of "Penn says". Check out his short video titled "Hilary Clinton is Scary" (should be in the scroll menu). Again, another quick laugh, but what makes it even more amusing (to me anyways) is that Penn is well known for his magic tricks and here he is trying his stab at political issues. What does that say about our country? More power to him.

Lastly, I was thinking about the class projects. And for those who have never been to this website before (it was very big in the last election), it might be something to consider. It's a pretty nice webpage with a lot of videos and other entertaining things going on.

www.Jibjab.com

My thought was that those who wanted to do a webpage for a project could put up a page, and those who wanted to do other types of projects could upload onto the page and it could be a wonderful melting pot of politcal stew with videos, blogs, etc. Just a thought.

Oh, and for those who have never seen this video (the reason why jibjab became so popular in the last election) here it is. It's quite amazing to say the least! enjoy

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/this_land

Announcing my blogging candidacy

Though writing this late, I'm doing so without having read anyone else's post.

In an effort to capture the coveted "ADHD" vote (political humor?), I'll bullet out my initial thoughts on the class, in addition to some notes about my political background:

• I'm more likely to argue a social issue than a fiscal one.


• I've assisted a family member in multiple elections when he made runs for prosecutor (once) and congress (twice). All three times were unsuccessful, but I'll never regret a second of the experiences.


• I have great respect for The Daily Show and Colbert Report's coverage of politics. Not that it's the only source I use, but it is the only source a lot of my peers use. I've watched TDS since "Craigers" hosted in the late '90s.


• I have a huge interest in Web marketing, social networking and their combined effect on this year's election. I'd really like to focus on this area during this course.


• I enjoy watching the West Wing. How is this relevant? I don't know.


• While I really want to get my video skill set up to a respectable level, I'm certainly more of a producer than an editor in the video realm.


• I'd really like to see the ability for students to branch off into areas other than video in the course. When video projects are needed, I'd like to see the very experienced teamed up with the no-so-experienced. I know this sounds like a given, but it's not likely to happen without a little organization.


• Can Facebook predict the election outcome? I'm not sure, but I'm eager to find out.

German Parties

Here are the links to the main German Parties:

Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
http://www.cdu.de/

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
http://www.spd.de/menu/-1/

The "Green Ones" (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen)
http://www.gruene.de/cms/default/rubrik/0/3.htm

The "Liberals" / Free Democratic Party (FDP)
http://www.liberale.de/

The "Left" (Die Linke)
http://www.die-linke.de/


The Republicans (REP)
http://www.rep.de/


National Democratic Party (NPD)
http://www.npd.de/

All the rest

The media tends to focus, fairly or not, on only a few of the more popular presidential candidates every election. Mental Floss seeks to remedy this injustice by posting a list of 12 Presidential Candidates to Keep Your Eye On.

The great thing about these elections is that anybody can run, so you tend to get some pretty crazy candidates. But it does seem like a few of the people on this list are truly very serious about running for president. They have their own...unique points of view and believe that they can do some good for this country. That's kind of cool in a way. Thankfully none of these wackjobs will ever get close to winning.

Monday: LBJ Day

So I have some pretty harsh words for Obama and Clinton but also the media as well this week. Ok, as most of you should know by now, there is a 'tif' going on between these two campaigns over comments that made about Martin Luther King.

Long story short, Obama used JFK and MLK in a rather high profile comment about 'not giving up their dreams'. Not a big deal...but this rhetoric seems to be getting to the Clinton campaign who have been effectively unable to tap into the civil rights movement (a democrat standard) because it 'belongs to the black man.' So Clinton responds to this by making a poorly thought out response giving credit to LBJ for getting the civil rights act enacted. The point her campaign gave her this direction was to 1. Get a finger in the civil right's pie, and 2. make a poorly worded statement about the need of an experienced leader.

So she screwed up - her wording made it feel as if LBJ was at least as important as MLK if not more so. When you actually watch playback though, it's a very innocent comment that was left too easy to manipulate. It goes to show the importance of anti-scripting...when she's trained to NOT say certain things...this time she failed miserably.

BUT, as I say, it was innocent. I don't believe this was Clinton's intention what-so-over but it was likely the weakest moment of her campaign. Still, the ensuing fight is what has really screwed things up...and for that I can only blame the media.

The media in this instant jumped all over their dream chance opportunity as a racial fight. It has the makin' for good TV...jackasses. This story was plastered all over the broadcast media and was a major driving force for the last week's blogs. The only reason either campaign went on with this message was to defend over the sheer hours of airplay this event was getting.

I'm quite aware it's go time for both these campaigns but...guess what guys...right now it's just important that people like you. Later on, when the right is swift-boating (could insert a tasteless joke in here, ask me quietly in person) whichever of these candidates makes it to the primary...then it's time to bring out the big guns.

At the end of the day, I think this little racial tif will not matter too much to the dems. It WILL make a bit of dialog for the debate and we'll prob get reminded about it for a week in September...but whatever.

Clinton: stop
Obama: stop
Media: vaporize

Digital Storytelling-Interactive Graphic/PhotoAudio Slideshow Presentation

For this weeks election blog- I wanted to post two forms of “digital storytelling.” The first is a very well-put-together interactive graphic from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/candidate-match-game.htm?loc=interstitialskip I really like the simplicity of this graphic. It is such a basic interactive, yet has lots of information included.

The second link is one of the more ridiculous pieces of election coverage: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/galleries/frontrunners/?jump=clinton This Flash presentation discusses the style and wardrobe choices of the candidates. Sadly, this comes from the Washington Post’s website. I was very disappointed in this feature.

How many videos posted in the presidential candidates' websites 1

I counted the videos posted on YouTube channel for each candidates and the selected ones on their websites, the following are the numbers:

Democratic Party:

Barack Obama has 95 selected videos on his campaign website from April 20, 2007 to Jan 13, 2008.(There are 460 on YouTube BarackObama.com channel)

Hillary Clinton have 85 selected videos on her campaign website from to Jan 22, 2007 to Jan 14, 2008 (There are 197 on YouTube hillaryclintondotcom channel)

John Edwards has 260 selected videos or TV ad on his campaign website from Oct, 2005 to Jan 14, 2008. (There are 361 on YouTube johnedwards channel)

Mike Gravel has 88 related YouTube videos link to his campaign website from Nov 22, 2006 to Jan 05, 2008. (There are 88 on YouTube gravel2008 channel)

Dennis Kucinich has 75 related YouTube videos link to his campaign website from Mar 14, 2007 to Jan 12, 2008. (There are 176 on YouTube Kucinich2008 channel)

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, Mínzhǔ Jìnbù Dǎng) in Taiwan holds similar political position as Democratic Party, the candidate of DPP is 謝長廷 (Hsieh, Chang-Ting) has 70 selected videos on his campaign website.

Campaigns using news as advertising

On one side it may be considered flattery or at least free advertising when campaigns use news reports in advertising. Things like,"The Indianapolis Star says..." or "CNN reports more people believe Obama than Clinton,"have shown up in flyers and even in tv spots touting a candidate.
As a journalist, I wouldn't want to appear to be backing any one candidate, especially without my permission!
Here's more in an article from Kelly McBride.
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Campaigns Putting News to Use

Reporters new to the politics beat are often shocked -- shocked -- to find their stories re-purposed as campaign ads. It happens all the time, on television ads and in printed fliers.

Reporters' objections are understandable. When favorable stories about a political candidate are used by a campaign or a political action committee to generate support, or when the opposition uses negative stories to tear down a candidate, it compromises the perception that the reporter and the newsroom are independent.

Most newsrooms have reprint policies that dictate who can obtain copyright permissions, what they can do with reprints and how much they have to pay. Given the perception problem, when it comes to political stories, why don't newsrooms refuse to grant permission to people who seek to use content for campaign purposes?

A recent case in Indiana shows just how hard that would be. Last September, Daily Herald columnist Amy Mack published a column detailing how the McHenry County State's Attorney had billed taxpayers $17,000 for sweets.

In November and December, someone anonymously mailed 900 copies of the column to residents in the area. Mack wrote a column telling readers she didn't send out the mailing.

Last week, a competing newspaper, the Northwest Herald, got to the bottom of things. It turns out the Republican Party Chairman Bill LeFew paid $400 of his own money to the Daily Herald to reprint and distribute the column. He did so, he said, to inform voters who might participate in an upcoming primary. He claims he was acting as a private citizen, using his own funds. He gained the permission through an online link on the paper's website.

Political interests on all sides directed their anger at the paper for allowing the column to be used.

Here are my questions: How could newsrooms limit reprints? Should they require those seeking reprints to refrain from using them in political ads? Is that legal? Would that have stopped the distribution in this case?

Or, is it better to be liberal with reprint requests? Would it leave newsrooms open to more charges of bias if they had to determine if a use was political? Are there any newsrooms out there that successfully limit use of their material in campaign ads?

New Hampshire burnout

It's been an eerie week for me...I haven't been interested in the state of the primaries. It's rare for me to go as long as have without watching CNN or reading the blogs, but I'm just not interested.

I guess I'm a little burnt out on the people from New Hampshire. I didn't take Clinton's win very well and watching the results into the night was a rather miserable affair. I was rooting for another Obama win but that's because I am quite confident in his electablity whereas I highly doubt Hillary's.

There are a lot more men that are afraid of women than racists (who might I add, probably vote republican anyways). Clinton would be dead out of the gate if she were in the general. It's not that I don't like Clinton, I really do. I romanticize about with Clinton foreign policy, it'd be wonderful.

One thing that I did pick up on was Daily KOS asking democrats to vote for Mitt Romney in the Michigan open election. I find it telling that the vocal left is pushing for a Romney win but it's not about the candidate necessarily. If Romney doesn't win Michigan, it puts serious doubt in his candidacy and it sets up a McCain vs Huckabee media narrative; War Hawks vs Christians...a wonderful divide in my opinion. But with a Romney win, it keeps him in the contest a while longer and forces them to spend more ad dollars doing negative ads accessible to a broader audience.

That's enough for now...I have all semester.