It’s been a few days since Yankee Magazine announced its New Hampshire Cookie Primary. In it, the nice Presidential folks submitted their favorite cookie recipes. Readers can rate the recipes online, and a panel of judges will also vote for their favorites on December 14 after the recipes are baked by culinary students at Southern New Hampshire University.

And, shock of shocks, Rep. Ron Paul so far appears to be the winner – if you go by the ratings at the website to date. There isn’t a single rating for any of the candidates’ recipes, but for Mrs. Paul’s Apricot Coconut Balls, 99% said they would make the recipe again, and an anonymous commenter said, “This was so easy! A great recipe that the kids can help with!”

But if Mrs. Paul’s recipe doesn’t win in New Hampshire next month, count on Paul’s supporters to claim that the panel was biased because the culinary student who baked it didn’t use enough condensed milk.

Meanwhile, amateur gender studies specialist and fulltime journalist Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times points out an interesting trend. While Democratic male contributors were mixed on whether or not the recipe they offered was their own, or just their wife’s/grandmother’s, not a single Republican candidate indicated that he baked these cookies himself.

But I’m sure they all like to lick the bowl.

Internet Operations, New Hampshire, Ron Paul | 3 Comments »

So says Colin Delany of e.politics and techPresident:

What a strange way to run a blog all around — normally, an article title links to a standalone version of the post, not to some outside piece. The way the Guiliani site is set up, I don’t see how you can link to a particular article, leave a comment or trackback, or do just about anything else you expect to be able to do on a normal blog. It’s as though they decided to create a blog-like piece of communications technology without the actual blog features. The only piece of reader interaction? That click-counter, whose sole effect is to make it look as though the site is essentially unread. Nice, um, job.

Internet Operations, Rudy Giuliani | No Comments »

Hilarious.

Internet Operations | No Comments »

Here’s the DNC on the Republicans’ country-club campaign:

The GOP tried hard to present a diverse face at the 2000 RNC. Next year’s convention looks to be a much more golf-clappy sort of affair.

Internet Operations, Presidential Debates | No Comments »

Today is the second anniversary of the tragic levee failure after Hurricane Katrina that led to the flooding of New Orleans and the death of thousands. Clearly, this is a layup for Presidential candidates. You pay tribute to the city and highlight your plans for reconstruction, as John Edwards and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have done.

So what have the Republican candidates worked up for this anniversary?

Rudy Giuliani: Three-line press release, no specifics.
Mitt Romney: Nothing on the front page.
Fred Thompson: Nothing on the front page.
John McCain: Three-paragraph press release, no specifics.
Mike Huckabee: Nothing on the front page, at the top of the site is a news flash that “Gov. Mike Huckabee to Participate in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate on September 5, 2007.”
Sam Brownback: Nothing on the front page.
Duncan Hunter: To his credit, Hunter was the only Republican to attend the “Hope and Recovery Summit” in New Orleans on Tuesday, and he writes about it. The story accentuates the positives, but at least he offers a tribute and some specifics.
Ron Paul: Nothing on the front page.
Tom Tancredo: Nothing on the front page.
John Cox: Nothing on the front page.

It’s not a scientific study, but it does offer at least a glimpse into the priorities of the Right’s Field. The citizens of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans aren’t on the top of the list.

Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, Internet Operations, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo | 13 Comments »

As many probably know, former Virginia Senator George “Macaca” Allen recently created his own blog. News of his new blog sped rapidly throughout the internet’s many tubes. But it turns out that another former presidential wannabe from Virginia has also become a blogger: Jim Gilmore. The website for Gilmore’s presidential bid, gilmoreforpresident.com, now redirects automatically to virginiapatriot.com. Indeed, Gilmore started up his blog less than two weeks after withdrawing from the GOP race in mid-July.

Both Allen and Gilmore occasionally wade into the comments sections of their posts (usually to thank adoring fans). Gilmore’s seems to be more of a regular opinion blog, while Allen’s is more likely to highlight articles by and about him. Allen’s blog is sponsored by the “Good Government Action Fund PAC” which he formed in late May to support local and statewide candidates and the blog allows visitors to donate (by snail mail) to the PAC. The PAC might be a stepping stone for Allen to reenter the political field, and Gilmore has already mused aloud about running for senate or governor in Virginia. Their sites also share one other similarity: their latest political defeats are glaringly absent from their biography sections.

Cross-posted at Ben Weyl Blog

Internet Operations, James Gilmore | 6 Comments »

Patrick Ruffini has a must-read post on how Republican candidates are being outspent 3-1 on new media. Commenting on a report from the National Journal’s Shira Toeplitz, Ruffini notes the disparity:

Looking closely at the list, I noticed another trend, and it’s a disturbing one that ties depressingly into the issues by the YouTube debate. While Republicans and Democrats are spending almost equally on their Web efforts, Democrats are spending dramatically more on in-house staff. Approximately 36% of the Democrats’ Web budgets are dedicated to staff, while less than 8% of the Republican budgets are. Overall, the Democratic candidates have 39 people working in the Web departments while Republicans have 18, spread over 9 active candidates. That works out to an average of 5.6 staffers per candidate on the Democrat side, and just 2 on the Republican side, encompassing both frontrunners and also-rans. Obama alone has 10 people on his Web staff… and it shows.

As Ruffini notes, the story here is that “Republicans are largely outsourcing their Web operations to highly capable technical firms” but are failing the develop the human capital — the “boots on the ground” — needed to make the most of new media for driving message and generating enthusiasm. If Republicans were the first to grasp how to use direct mail, talk radio, and the 24-hour cable news cycle, they may finally be losing their innovative edge during the era of the internet.

Internet Operations | 1 Comment »

Last year, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook were integrated into political campaigns on such a large scale for the first time. Displaying their power to reach, communicate and activate supporters at the district and state-levels, presidential campaigns took notice.

Presidential campaigns are now being graded on just effectively they are integrating what have become standard online tools and what, if any, innovations they come up with.

However, as campaigns are learning, these tools also carry an immense amount of political risk. Take for instance, Senator Barack Obama’s (D-Illinois) MySpace dust up.

But that was a battle over who control the list of thousands of MySpace users that eagerly signed up to learn more about Obama’s candidacy. What is the accountability for user-generated content that crosses the line?

Take, for instance, this comment on former Senator Fred Thompson’s official MySpace page. The comment by “thediscman” features only an image that has a cartoon of a woman in a burka asking, “Does this bomb make my butt look big?”

That comment, posted June 21, still sits among the 316 comments, on page three as of the publishing of this post. And “thediscman” is a frequent commenter, posting nearly every day.

“thediscman” posted another comment on June 22 that featured one image:

His comment?

If only we had these values still….we would have far less divorce. Run Fred and bring back traditional values to this great land!!!

~j

Fred Thompson, Internet Operations | 1 Comment »

Cross-posted at Iowa Independent

Eleven minutes after voting in favor of cloture on the Senate immigration bill, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback changed his mind—and his vote—to oppose cloture, MSNBC reported earlier today. Now it seems that the Brownback campaign has changed its mind again, this time on a press release it produced just days ago. On Tuesday, June 26, the campaign released a statement after Brownback voted in favor of cloture. The statement originally appeared here. It’s now gone, but was cached and can be seen here.

Go read the rest of the story here.

Internet Operations, Sam Brownback | No Comments »

Fred Thompson — lobbyist, actor, and conservative messiah — has a pretty good thing going. As Cliff Schecter reports, Thompson is being paid by ABC to campaign for the presidency:

Of particular interest currently, is that Thompson not only maintains a constant presence on ABC Radio delivering opinion and analysis, but also provides daily podcasts for the ABC Radio website along with his own goofy version of a blog. He is doing this, mind you, after already having declared his intention to run for President numerous times.

At Daily Kos, Trapper John compares Thompson’s naked conflict of interest to Wes Clark’s resignation from CNN prior to the 2004 election (and notes the strange silence of certain media scolds this time around).

One might suggest that Thompson’s untimely devotion to his “contractual things” is yet more evidence that he’s more lobbyist than anything else: unable to separate the concept of private interest from that of public service. Given the public’s exhaustion with crony conservatism, it’s hardly a promising sign.

Fred Thompson, Internet Operations | No Comments »