Updated below 

As Kombiz noted earlier, John McCain announced his candidacy tonight on Letterman. The McCain campaign posted the video on it’s site, viewable here.

As much as McCain is trying to be cool by announcing on a late night TV show and as much as his campaign is trying to be savvy by sending the video of said announcement to their email list early, the McCain web presence leaves much to be desired. Frankly these guys just don’t get the use of viral video as a means of growing a campaign, let alone the ever-changing dynamic that comes from spreading video online and translating that spread into online fundraising. What makes me say this? Take a look at the screen capture copied below:

The video of McCain’s announcement appears on an online donation page as an afterthought. I view the web on a large display and the above capture’s natural dimensions are 1197 x 1054 pixels. Yet the video of the candidate announcing that he wants to be President of the United States of America was a measly 287 x 203 pixels. Of the 1.2 million square pixels that I saw on McCain’s announcement page, only 58,000 square pixels were the video I cam to see. That works out to be only 4.61% of the screen that I saw on the page that McCain asked me to visit to see his announcement speech. The information that I would have to enter about my billing address takes up more space than the video of McCain making his announcement.

Before anyone complains, I’ll add a few caveats. One, I use a big monitor, so there’s more empty space around the body than others might have. Two, McCain’s campaign home page has the video on larger scale. Actually he has it in two places - one a sensibly big embed on the front page itself, the other a link to the same donation/video page pictured above.

But both of these concessions just speak to the McCain campaign’s lack of understanding of email lists, embedded video, and online fundraising. Some people use big monitors and you might want to include a video that isn’t dwarfed by the visitor’s state drop-down menu. I don’t want have to go blind watching the video of the candidate announcing amidst my credit card information (don’t worry, I didn’t donate). This is probably the most important email McCain has sent to his email list in this campaign so far. And yet when I click through, I am overwhelmed by 95% of a screen that is not the candidate announcing his candidacy. This isn’t just silly, this is indicative of a fundamental lack of understanding of how to communicate online.

Kudos to McCain for finding a cutesy way to announce that he wants to be President. I’m sure that matters to someone, somewhere. But good God, if this doesn’t smack of a 70-year old trying to use the internet for the first time…

Update

Michael Turk of techPresident makes another observation about the failure of McCain’s online announcement strategy:

In yet another indication that the McCain folks need to find a new Internet guy, this e-mail was kind of a bonehead move. A message sent at 9pm announcing a TV appearance at 11pm is going to miss a lot of people. Even those on the left coast are leaving work by 6pm and probably missed the missive.

This is a message that should have been sent this morning to drum up media interest in the announcement, as well as supporter interest in watching. A staggering majority of the people on his list probably won’t see this until tomorrow, and it will be too late to catch the event.

Technorati Tags: announcement speech, John McCain, David Letterman

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McCain wins it by announcing unofficially on David Letterman more than a month early. (Hat tip to the good folks at Politics TV.)

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AP:

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge will serve as national co-chair of Republican John McCain’s presidential exploratory committee, the campaign said Wednesday.

This would probably be more impactful if Tom Ridge was still DHS Chair. McCain’s candidacy could really benefit from timely terror threat warnings. For example, “DHS Secretary Tom Ridge raised the terror threat level to “Severe” after new polls showed Giuliani with a 23-point lead someone found a firecracker in Pakistan.”

On a different note, this paragraph from the same AP article indicates a tremendous shift in where Conventional Wisdom ranks the Republican field.

McCain, once seen as the Republican front-runner, has been leading the GOP presidential field in endorsements, but increasingly lags behind former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in polls of Republican voters.

Now, granted, this is an AP wire story and not, say, the latest piece by David Broder or Jim VandeHei. But clearly McCain’s candidacy is free-falling in the polls and the eyes of reporters covering the race.

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Jeffrey Feldman has a can’t miss post up on Rudy Giuliani, America’s premier political transvestite.

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The Hill is reporting that Mike Huckabee might drop his presidential bid to run for Senate against Mark Pryor in 2008. Huckabee has a presidential exploratory committee, but has not formally announced his candidacy for president. Some Republican supporters and bloggers in Arkansas are hoping Huckabee decides not to run for president and takes a crack at Pryor. The state GOP doesn’t have any real prospects for a candidate who can beat Pryor, though the NRSC is claiming to have options beyond Huckabee (they do, they’re just not good ones).

Although those close to Huckabee chalk up the Senate talk to overanxious bloggers and speculation, some see Huckabee-for-Senate as a real possibility and most Republicans make it clear they would welcome him home.

One state GOP source familiar with Huckabee’s campaign said a Senate bid could indeed materialize and that it’s something Huckabee has considered and analyzed. Huckabee ran for Senate in 1992.

Huckabee couldn’t wait too long to abandon the presidential bid, the source said, and the Aug. 11 Republican straw poll in Ames, Iowa, could be a fork in the road.

“If he’s knocked out by the straw poll, then, yes, that’s a credible scenario,” the source said. “If he’s still around, I think, timeline-wise, it would add to the baggage that he already has in the state to drop a presidential [campaign] and come back and run for Senate.”

Huckabee’s presidential campaign said a Senate bid is not in the works and that it’s not something he’s looking at right now. [Emphasis added]

So there’s been private talk of a Senate run, but nothing formal. Announcing that he was considering a Senate run now would effectively kill what little momentum he’s gained in the presidential race so far. Huckabee has a long way to go. He’s a second-tier candidate who could - or perhaps even should - be a top-tier candidate in a primary based around faithfulness to Republican ideology. But as Matt Stoller has pointed out, the Republican presidential primary isn’t based around explicit ideological qualifications. We see this with the strength of the Giuliani, Romney, and McCain campaigns. Giuliani is a social moderate, Romney used to be a social moderate, and McCain, though a staunch conservative, is perceived as a moderate. Lower-tier Republican candidates like Huckabee and Sam Brownback are suffering because of this and will have to work doubly hard to find oxygen in an environment where donor dollars and media air time are being sucked up by the front-runners.

Technorati Tags: John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, 2008 elections, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback

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Former RNC web guru Patrick Ruffini signed onto the Rudy Giuliani campaign over a month ago. The only semi-coherent response on Giuliani’s social liberalism that I’ve seen is that Giuliani’s views are known and digested by conservative Republican primary voters. On the blurb portion of his blog he points to a Fox News poll that shows:

“Giuliani jumps to 56 - 31 lead in a head-to-head GOP primary matchup with McCain. And by a 2-to-1 margin, GOP primary voters have an accurate view of the Mayor’s positions on social issues. “

Ruffini’s characterization isn’t quite accurate since the Fox poll asks whether Republicans know if Giuliani is Pro-Life or Pro-Choice. 42% say they know he’s pro-choice while 21% think he’s pro-life and 36% of Republican primary voters don’t know whether Giuliani is pro-choice or pro-life. On a previous question in the same poll Republican voters are asked whether they’re more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights. 46% of Republican primary voters say they’re less likely to vote for a pro-choice candidate and by a margin of 50% to 8% they say they’re less likely to support a candidate that supports civil unions for gays and lesbians.

Here’s the second question about Giuliani’s campaign. He’s certainly in a very strong position in the Republican primary but if he were to become the Republican nominee for president could Republicans ever run social issue campaigns against Democrats again with a straight face?

Ed. Note: While searching for candidate video’s I found this newly uploaded video that has some conservatives asking themselves the same question about Giuliani.

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Being petrified of brown people doesn’t make it OK to use your PAC’s money to promote your presidential campaign and buy TV ads in New Hampshire.

Republican presidential candidate Duncan Hunter, a California congressman, has used his political action committee to run New Hampshire television ads introducing himself to voters — in what some specialists say could be a violation of campaign finance laws.

In the ads, Hunter walks beside a huge wire fence and calls for it to be extended along hundreds of miles of the US border with Mexico. He then asks for viewers to “join with me, Duncan Hunter, at Peace Through Strength. Let’s make sure Homeland Security builds the border fence.”

At the end of the ad, viewers are encouraged to visit the PAC’s website, peacethroughstrengthpac.com. If viewers to go to the site a page appears that reads “please visit Duncan Hunter for President 2008″ and providing the link to his homepage, a move that can imply the PAC’s endorsement, another potential law violation. Campaign finance laws limit the use of PACs, which have much higher limits on individual donations than those imposed on presidential campaigns, to no more than $5,000 in spending on any presidential candidacy.

But in New Hampshire alone, Hunter’s Peace Through Strength PAC made two separate ad buys on WMUR-TV in Manchester totaling $17,575. Both purchases were made after Hunter opened his presidential committee, which is supposed to cover the costs of his run for the White House.
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“I don’t think [Hunter’s use of both committees] is a loophole — it might be an outright violation,” said Stephen R. Weissman, associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute in Washington.

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Theodore Hamm, a Metropolitan College professor, has a revealing piece on Truthdig about Giuliani’s tenure as mayor. Focused around the screening of the new documentary, Giuliani Time, Hamm addresses Giuliani’s horrendous record on race.

Why is there such contempt for the man who never tires of reminding audiences of how he “saved” the city after 9/11? As “Giuliani Time” makes abundantly clear, it’s because in the eight years he reigned as New York City mayor leading up to 9/11, Giuliani ruled as a petty tyrant. And the most frequent target of his animosities was the city’s black population.

After defeating the city’s only black mayor, David Dinkins, in 1993, Giuliani made it crystal clear that he was not interested in a dialogue about race relations. During his first month in office, Giuliani ended the city’s affirmative action program established under Dinkins. For most of the next eight years, he conspicuously refused to meet with any of the city’s black political leadership.

In the documentary, Giuliani’s one high-ranking black political appointee during his two terms, schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, voices his displeasure with his former boss. Crew recalls his surprise when Giuliani announced that he would pursue a school vouchers program, a policy that promised to further deprive the city’s many poor students of color of educational resources. It was during the Amadou Diallo controversy, Crew says, when he realized that there “is something very deeply pathological” about Giuliani’s views of race.
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In terms of crime, Giuliani’s overzealous “quality-of-life” policing effectively amounted to a full-fledged crackdown on young men of color, as documented by the NYPD’s record number of wrongful “stop-and-frisk” encounters. Prior to his post-9/11 “heroics,” Giuliani was best known for having “cleaned up New York.” But as Columbia University’s Jeffrey Fagan and others make clear in “Giuliani Time,” crime dropped even more dramatically in other major cities during the 1990s—and many of those cities did not employ the racially biased quality-of-life approach of Giuliani’s NYPD.

New Yorkers know that there is more to Rudy Giuliani than the man who appeared in lower Manhattan in shirtsleeves on September 11th, 2001. New Yorkers like Hamm are going to continue to remind the rest of the country about Giuliani’s authoritarian and racist tendencies simply because he was such a terrible mayor.

If we judge him based on his actions during his two terms in office, rather than by the two weeks after 9/11, the thought of Rudolph Giuliani becoming president should alarm most progressives. And for people of color in New York City and elsewhere, the prospect is terrifying.

Unfortunately for progressives, the Republican primary is not going to be decided on which candidate appeals to them or minority voters. The Democratic base and people of color are two constituencies that are not taken into account when discussing the electability of Republican presidential candidates — even though Democratic hopefuls are judged by their ability to win conservative Christian voters in red states. That said, the prospect of Giuliani winning the nomination and his candidacy being painted based on his mayoral administration’s destructive, racist policies should be enough to scare Republicans who want to see one of their own in the White House in 2009.

Technorati Tags: Rudy Giuliani

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The Romney campaign couldn’t keep its hands on its seventy-seven slide PowerPoint that crafts its campaign strategy, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Mitt Romney as a candidate. The Boston Globe obtained a copy of it and has released some of the details.

Here are some views of Mitt Romney causing concern inside his campaign: His hair looks too perfect, he’s not a tough war time leader, and he has earned a reputation as “Slick Dancing Mitt” or “Flip-Flop Mitt.”

Romney and his advisers have identified those perceptions as threats to his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, according to an exhaustive internal campaign document obtained by the Globe.
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The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as “jihadism,” the “Washington establishment,” and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, “European-style socialism,” and, specifically, France. Even Massachusetts, where Romney has lived for almost 40 years, is listed as one of those “bogeymen,” alongside liberalism and Hollywood values.

Indeed, a page titled “Primal Code for Brand Romney” said that Romney should define himself as a foil to Bay State Democrats such as Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry and former governor Michael Dukakis. Romney should position himself as “the anti-Kerry,” the presentation says. But elsewhere in the plan, it’s clear that Romney and his aides are aware he’s open to the same charge that helped derail Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004: that he is a flip-flopper who has changed positions out of political expediency.

Here’s Romney’s sell on himself:

The plan concedes that, with McCain and Giuliani in the race, Romney is unlikely to be the top pick for those voters looking for a “war/strong leader.” His goal appears to be establishing himself as a credible second choice for those voters, but the first pick for voters looking for an energetic, optimistic, and innovative chief executive. (A page titled “Own the future” dubs McCain the past, Giuliani the present, and Romney the future. )

The case for Romney, according to the plan, is this: “Mitt Romney, tested, intelligent, get-it-done, turnaround CEO Governor and strong leader from outside Washington, is a better candidate than McCain & Giuliani to ensure that America’s strength is maintained so we can meet a new generation of global challenges.”

Romney’s oppo research on Rudy Giuliani is pretty interesting.

Giuliani is called an outside-the-Beltway rock star and truth teller who earned the nation’s trust for his leadership of New York City’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he is described as a one-dimensional Lone Ranger whose social views — he supports abortion rights and civil unions for gay couples — could destroy the “GOP brand.” “We can’t disqualify Dems like Hillary on social issues ever again” if Giuliani is the nominee, the document states.

The plan also touches on what it calls Giuliani’s ethical issues, including his relationship with Bernard Kerik , former New York police commissioner who withdrew from consideration to become US homeland security secretary amid allegations of improprieties. It raises Giuliani’s “personal political liabilities,” an apparent reference to his three marriages and bitter public divorce from his second wife, Donna Hanover.

The Giuliani campaign had a similar campaign strategy document leaked in January. More recently, a 1991 opposition research text was leaked on Giuliani.

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Oliver Willis shares the audio of Rudy Giuliani lambasting a constituent’s obsession with ferrets and the laws that govern ferrets in NYC.

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