It appears that all pro-McCain profiles at MySpace were deleted because of a miscommunication between McCain’s staff and the company. Here is the official announcement:
Over the last couple of weeks, the eCampaign at John McCain 2008 has been working to get a new website launched and begin engaging in the social networks. When I joined MySpace, I was proud to see the strong grassroots efforts people like you were making on behalf of Senator McCain and his campaign for President. I joined many of those groups with excitement.
In the last few days, we at the campaign began a discussion with MySpace about creating an official profile for Senator McCain. In the course of that conversation, a member of my team miscommunicated the campaign’s plans to MySpace, leading to the removal of all the pro-McCain grassroots pages created by supporters like you. Following the example of Senator McCain and in the interests of “straight talk,†I wanted to you to know exactly what transpired. When this miscommunication came to my attention, I immediately began working with MySpace to resurrect those sites, taking the issue to the highest levels of the company. Unfortunately, that effort was not successful. When content is deleted at MySpace it cannot be recreated.
I am extremely disappointed and sorry that this has happened. It is not only unfair to supporters like you who have worked so hard on Senator McCain’s behalf, it is a disservice to the campaign as we now have no forums in which to reach all those supporters you had worked to assemble.
I would like you to know that we will soon be launching an official John McCain profile at MySpace. I hope you will consider joining that group and trying to help recreate the strong presence of John McCain supporters in MySpace. I would also be glad to see you re-start your McCain group. If there is anything I can do to assist that effort, please let me know and I would be happy to personally help.
Please accept my sincere apologies once again. I wish there was something that could be done to change what has happened, but all I can ask is your help in moving forward and rebuilding. I hope we’ll be working closely together as the campaign progresses.
Sincerely,
Christian Ferry
National eCampaign Director
John McCain 2008
I am rather surprised it has taken McCain’s camp this long to put together a MySpace profile. There isn’t a lot of laborious work involved. From my repeated criticism of McCain’s Web site (despite the fact, mind you, that McCain advertises here constantly) you know I don’t have a lot of good things to say about McCain’s web effort. Still I am hoping they will turn things around.
Latest polling results:
1) An astonishingly high amount of those polled 65% say they are interested in the ‘08 election. It isn’t even March 2007 yet, that is a huge number.
2) Giuliani has a 2-1 lead over McCain (though his standing on social issues make even those who support him now less likely to vote for him in the long run according to those polled)
3) Romney got killed in this round polling lower than Newt Gingrich who currently is not running
4) Clinton still leads Dems but Obama is gaining. The gain is 100% attributed to black voters
Well we have one day left in February so I thought I would go ahead and put together my monthly recap.
Little actually happened in the campaign this month. Some people announced their runs, No big surprises, and two candidates got into a spat, not such a big deal if you ask me. When David Geffen & Maureen Dowd are the epicenter of a political fight I wouldn’t exactly say it was substantive.
The spat did two things. First it filled a void of little to nothing major to report on this month. Sure there was Anna Nicole and Britney but not hard news. Nor was Obama and Hillary but without them somebody might actually have had to look into what is going on in Iran. I mean, someone other than Seymour Hersh.
First Giuliani’s planning documents made it to the Internet and the hands of his rivals and now its Mitt Romney’s. Part of me wonders if these aren’t deliberate leaks and part of me is really questioning the Republicans as of late. Normally they are the top-down, buttoned up, ready to roll party who would be out in force by this time of the year and by the end of July or August would have settled on a candidate. This year? Not so much.
I understand President Bush’s popularity isn’t helping nor are the 2006 election losses, but somebody needs to take the Republicans up. When they aren’t even going after Hillary Clinton, something just isn’t right.
Written in light of the Amanda Marcotte episode with the John Edwards campaign Lindsay Beyerstein tells her story at Salon and does a good job of summing up many of my own thoughts about blogging and elections.
“The Clintons’ Latest Project is to Contrive Ways to Knock Barack Obama Off His White Horse and Muddy Him Up a Little”
This is what I call a “no crap” article. Why? Because it’s an entire article telling us something we already know in a way that makes it seem like it is giving us insight when really its just pulling together a ton of things we could have figured out by ourselves. It also often makes a person look bad or good for basically doing nothing.
Since the Obama/Hillary scuff there has been tons of these articles. Here is the premise. Hillary Clinton is going to try and beat Barack Obama in the primary by finding things that would make people want to vote for her and not him. Wow, fantastic, what a concept. So basically she is running for office in an election. Lets go to print I think we have a winner!
A few weeks ago the big news was that all of these candidates were going to raise money. “Hillary Plans on Raising Money, John Edwards Sets Goal of Raising Money, Mitt Romney Would Really Like to Raise Money!” Wow newspapers, wow.
Every election year its the exact same story. “Candidate X Is Set to Raise More Money This Time Than Was Raised Last Time” or, “Election Most Expensive Yet!” Isn’t that the point? Don’t things often grow over time? If the election didn’t cost more in 2008 than it did in 2004 I think we would have a pretty big problem with the economy. Another news flash for you? It took more dollars to elect George W. Bush than it did Herbert Hoover. Can you guess why?
Basically every one of these articles is stating the blatantly obvious. A candidate for a party’s nomination wants to win that nomination which will come at the expense of other candidates who want it. Meanwhile it will cost more, the likelihood that one of these candidates will belong to an ethnic group/gender or other population that has never been elected before will rise as will the amount of time covered on the election? Why?
1) That is what politicians do.
2) Things cost more over time and as the economy/population grows
3) There has only ever been white males over the age of 35 who have held the office but more than half the population is woman and an increasing percentage gay, black, hispanic or of other or mixed descent
4) There are more media outlets available to the consumer and more devices that need content.
I just wrote the meat of 90% of the articles being written. All I have to do is throw in some quotes from bloggers, ex campaign workers and “analysts” from some non-profit think tank or university and I would be golden.
As was about ten dozen other speculators who said Al Gore COULD announce his presidential run at the Oscar’s. But since they say COULD after writing sensational headlines and lead paragraphs with no real sources they get away with it.
Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth did win the Oscar for Best Documentary Film, but Gore made no such announcement. So you would guess that all the articles being written about his possible run for president have now stopped. Oh quite the contrary, they are at an all time ‘08 high my friends!
Meanwhile the top H1 story at Drudge? “GORE MANSION USES 20X AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD; CONSUMPTION INCREASE AFTER ‘TRUTH’” Apparently the attempted assassination of the Iraqi Vice President (and stroke of Iraqi President) just aren’t newsy enough.
Man CNN has really been letting me down lately. You have all the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears as if its actual news and a Web site growing with articles filled with nothing more than pure speculation.
The latest is from “CNN Political Analyst” Bill Scheider who speculates that Al Gore could use his Oscar speech to start his presidency. Which he could do. He could also use the speech to get up and say he was “wrong about this whole global warming thing” and then take a fruity drink in his hand and toss up a sombrero and start making out with Tipper like he did in 2000. the liklihood of both? About equal.
This has been a VERY SLOW news week, especially campaign related news. Since so many Web sites are springing up around the 2008 election I thought I would use the lull to spotlight some of them.
techPresident is a site devoted to, you guessed it, technology and the presidential election. How campaigns are using tech and how tech is using the campaigns.
The site tracks the candidates myspace friends like the stock market, charts the mentions of each candidate on technorati, keeps an up to date blog of related news, articles etc., scours Flickr for new election related photos, watches YouTube and keeps you punched into campaign RSS feeds. It really is an informative and interesting resource that should be in your bookmarks. All that and they are just getting started.
