by WonkoKevin

It’s always so easy to tell when my students plaguerize.  All I need to do is take a full sentence from their text and stick it into Google and see what comes up.  Today’s plaguerized text of the day is spreading the rumor that Joe Biden will step down and Hillary Clinton will step in as VP.  Here’s the anonymous email being passed around (sometimes it’s appropriately cited and sometimes it’s simply portrayed as though written by the blogger on the site):

Let me share some info with you that I have gotten from excellent sources within the DNC:  On or about October 5th, Biden will excuse himself from the ticket, citing health problems, and he will be replaced by Hillary. This is timed to occur after the VP debate on 10/2. There have been talks all weekend about how to proceed with this info. generally, the feeling is that we should all go ahead and get it out there to as many blog sites and personal email lists as is possible. I have already seen a few short blurbs about this - the “health problem” cited in those articles was aneurysm. Probably many of you have heard the same rumblings.  However, at this point, with this inside info from the DNC, it looks like this Obama strategy will be a go.  Therefore, it seems that the best strategy is to get out in front of this Obama maneuver, spell it out in detail, and thereby expose it for the grand manipulation that it is.  So, let’s start mixing this one up and cut the Obamites off at the pass - send this info out to as many people as you can - post about it on websites and blogs, etc.

When I did a Google search on “biden ‘probably many of you have heard the same rumblings’” I got 582 hits.  I find it terribly interesting that almost all of the discussion concerning the email is whether it strategically makes sense, rather than whether it’s true.  There’s an almost working assumption the email must be real and that Obama’s meeting with Clinton in Harlem was were the devil deal was made.

The analysis I’ve found that I got the biggest kick out of was from Death by 1000 Papercuts.  “Mondo” does a detailed examination of Obama and McCain’s web sites and merchandise stores and smells something funny; while McCain was quick to add Palin to the web site and merchanside, there is almost no Obama-Biden merchandise available:

Thinking, “this is how rumors get started,” a little road trip seemed to be in order.  If Joe Biden were not the solid VP pick–and due to be replaced in the rumored “October Surprise”–it would seem that there wouldn’t be much of an investment made by the Obama campaign in Obama-Biden campaign materials and merchandise.  We visited three Obama campaign offices in three different states, called several others in a few states picked at random and checked out Barackobama.com’s online store to see what the situation was.  There seemed to be plenty of campaign material for Barack Obama, sans Biden. In fact, “Obama-Biden” didn’t seem to be much on display at all in any of the offices.

It’s been nearly a month since Barack Obama named Joe Biden as his vice-presidential pick: what’s the hold-up with the Obama-Biden campaign materials? Why is there almost no Obama-Biden merchandise available?  This is a candidate whose campaign has planned for this race for months–some would say years.  As was stated, there is no end to the “Only Obama” campaign materials.

Joyce, in the Portland OR Obama office told us that, “No one has any (Obama-Biden campaign merchandise).  We don’t have any Obama-Biden stuff. The national campaign says it’s sold out and back-ordered. It’ll be about two weeks until we get any.”  Two weeks?  That would place the date around the 4th or 5th of October, incidentally.

We talked to Paul in the Washington PA Obama office–which was busy at the time–and he told us that there wasn’t any Obama-Biden signs, t-shirts or stickers in that office, at least right now.  We were told that there were “some Obama-Biden buttons. We’re asking a $50 donation for them.”  … Dan, at the Belmont office in Bellaire OH, said, “No, we don’t have any Obama-Biden signs or T-shirts. They’re supposed to be coming in the next couple weeks.”

by WonkoKevin

Some of you out in the Wonksophere may have noticed that while Obama’s mud level (how much negative language he uses when talking about McCain) has been consistently lower than McCain’s mud level, the actual volume of statements from one about the other has been drastically different.  McCain’s press releases and published speeches average about 10 Obama mentions a day, while Obama’s mentions of McCain’s average maybe 1 per day.  The difference is caused by their definition of ”press release”.  In Obama’s case, only statements by Obama himself are being pushed as press releases, and he almost never mentions McCain in these statements.  McCain’s campaign repackages or redistributes news stories or editorials by other media and counts it as a press release, and those tend to be heavy negative on Obama.  As a quasi-journalist, I don’t think it’s correct for McCain to be calling these redistributions “press releases”.  On the other hand, the public and media don’t care what they’re called, and it represents an advantage to McCain.

by WonkoSteve

The more observant among you will notice that we’ve made a change to the Wonkosphere home page and have added a new Mud Meter tab.  This is a reprise of a similar service we ran during the 2004 election, to keep track of who is saying more negative things about their opponent from day to day.

The calculations are based on press releases and speech transcripts from the candidates’ official web sites.  The Mud Meter shows, on a 1 to 10 scale, how negative the language is in sentences mentioning the opponent.  The value is an average over the previous week.

The Mud Meter tab shows these values for each candidate over the last 30 days, as well as the number of mentions.  It also gives influential words each candidate is associating with the other over the last week.

The story so far is that Obama is just not mentioning McCain very much, compared to McCain’s mentions of Obama. OTOH it appears that he got the message from disgruntled dems about not hitting back hard enough, considering the large jump in his mud meter value over the last week or so.

We have also noticed that Obama’s campaign doesn’t seem to be nearly as conscientious about updating their web site as McCain’s.  How strange, given that Obama is supposed to be the hipster and has a more sophisticated web operation in other ways.

Because there are only two candidates people are seriously talking about anymore, we also replaced the bar chart showing buzz share with a pie chart showing McCain, Obama, and all other candidates.

Enjoy!  And watch this space for more analysis of the Mud Meter and comparisons to the 2004 campaign.

by WonkoKevin

Headline gotcha’, didn’t it?  One thing I’ve noticed from my time in the blogosphere is that (a) titles make a difference in traffic to the post, and (b) titles are often more “out there” than the rest of the post.  Given the opportunity of 10 or 100 or 1000 words in a post to say something outrageous, often the most outrageous statement is in the title rather than the post.  Here’s today’s excellent advice from Jeff Fecke at Shakesville: (more…)

by WonkoKevin

Iowa and New Hampshire were key. Always have been. Until they were over, and then South Carolina was the turning point. And then Tsunami Tuesday was the non-turning point. I think somewhere along the way Maine and Wyoming were important. What can we make of this campaign season that continues to refuse to conform? In Politics 1.0, averages and totals were the key stats–how many votes, how many delegates, etc. In Politics 2.0, it’s not the averages that define where things are going but rather the extremes. In old politics, the center wagged the extremes; in new politics, the extremes wag the average. When it comes to extremes this campaign season, one place in the U.S. dominates–the Inner West. Maybe we should look to the Inner West for where the body politic is heading.

The Inner West of the U.S. handed many of the candidates their best results of the season. In Utah, Mitt Romney won an astonishing 90%. Ron Paul had his best showing in Montana, at 25%. Barack Obama loves Iowa, which handed him a 79% victory. Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee were big shots in the South, but it was the central plains where they brought it home–Thompson with 25% in Wyoming and Huckaee with 60% in Kansas (equalling what he got in Arkansas, his home state). Even Duncan Hunter had his best outing in the Inner West with 2% in Nevada.

There were several other patterns I observed. First, the South gave two of the three remaining candidates their biggest wins. Hillary Clinton pulled down 70% in Arkansas, and John McCain’s biggest victory to date came in Mississippi (79%). Delaware awarded hometome boy Joe Biden his best showing (3%); Michigan’s shortened list resulted in best outings for Chris Dodd (1%), Mike Gravel (0.5%), and and Dennis Kucinich (4%); John Edwards (30% in Iowa) and Bill Richardson (5% in New Hampshire) faded early; and Rudy Giuliani really did do his best in Florida, just like he had planned (15%). Alan Keyes, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Tommy Thompson didn’t register above 0.5%.

by WonkoKevin

It was supposed to be over by now. In fact, back in March 2007, most bloggers were dreading this portion of the campaign season, for it represented the long haul between knowing who the two candidates were and the corresponding conventions. What the hell was there going to be to talk about? A few dreamers told us to consider the possibility that it wouldn’t be over by Super Tuesday, but who believed them? Certainly not the states, who ran over each other this year to be early. Michigan and Florida were so convinced that it would be over by Feb 5 they gambled their convention seating; nice move. Well, be careful what you wish for because now we have it–the campaign that won’t stop. Unless Clinton gets beat 60-40 in PA, this looks to be going all the way to the convention, and given the lateness of selecting a Democrat, the ensuing rush to November will be all the more intense. Bloggers and other politicos not only are going to miss spring break this week, they’re going to be going on summer vacations with their Blackberries close in hand.

So given that Obama and Clinton are going to continue to duke it out for months, what’s next? What happens when a conversation goes on way too long? Here are five things that happen in person-to-person conversations that go beyond their limit; I imagine the same will happen between both the candidates and their respective bloggers.

1. Obsessive loops–you keep on saying the same thing, over and over and over again. This is part of…

2. Go on auto-pilot. Everything is routinized so as to make it to the next day.

3. Say stupid things; also see: Say too much.

4. Tit for tat, see also: She said, he said.

5. No time to think–when all you’re doing is verbal tennis, who has time to think of something worthwhile to say?

by WonkoKevin

Congratulations to John McCain for making his nomination official.  In the end, McCain won not so much because he forged a conservative coalition a priori, but because he ran the best campaign.  After a messy start, he cleaned house and did well in all important dimensions: retail, fundraising, press relations, and consistency.   These are all things that will continue to bode well for him into the fall.  A positive word also has to be said about Mike Huckabee, who has formally dropped out of the race.  Huckabee, not Ron Paul, was the pentultimate Politics 2.0 candidate.  The blogsphere fell in love with him early on, provided grass roots support, and in part fueled his Iowa performance; in the end, the blogosphere is also responsible from being him down with 6 weeks of negative buzz following his climb in the polls.  I doubt Huckabee could have gotten this far pre-Internet.

Man was I wrong on my Obama sweep prediction.  Kudos to Clinton who actually outdid their own expecatations and who gained the right to claim victory this morning.  My prediction of Obama wins was based on the fact that in the last 2 months of primaries, Obama’s poll numbers have been significantly underestimated.  Not this time.  Instead, I should have paid attention to the Wonkosphere data.  Check out Hillary’s buzz share in the last two weeks (conservative-red, liberal-blue).  Note how it spiked up starting 2/29.  Let’s see what kind of buzz-legs her victories have for her now.  Will she retake the lead from Obama in liberal buzz share?  Will she again become the primary target for conservative bloggers?  All this and more, stay tuned!

by WonkoKevin

Every four hours each of the candidates’ Wonkosphere buzz page is re-generated, and it gives you a snap-shot of the 30 most representative posts about the candidate over the last several days (biased towards recent posts). We identify those posts that are most representative by using computerized text analysis, which measures how “close” each post is to another, and then selects those posts that are on average the most similar to all other posts. You’ll note that the 30 the computer chooses are independent of affiliation, so we can look at the ratio of red to blue to get a sense of which side is being more focused.

For example, in today’s buzz for John McCain, there are 7 liberal posts and 21 conservative posts (and 2 independent)–that means the conservative posts outnumber the liberal posts 3:1–in this small subset of the most representative posts. That means conservative bloggers are best describing what the collective buzz is. The same is true for Mike Huckabee’s most representative posts, where the conservative posts outnumber the liberal posts almost 3:1. What is interesting is that the same ratio holds for Barack Obama, 3:1! This means conservative bloggers are also shaping the Obama dialogue right now; liberal bloggers are still more numerous in their posts about Obama, but their dialogue on him is more varied, i.e. less focused. This will be an interesting development to watch because it’s the same “problem” we saw with liberal dialogue about Kerry in 2004–no central message, and no message discipline.

by WonkoKevin

“It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.” In a sign of our Politics 2.0 times, the liberal site MyDD posted suggestions yesterday on how to “Google bomb” John McCain. By “flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.” In McCain’s case, the goal of bombers would be to create web sites that link to negative McCain stories or videos; by embedding words on these new web pages, these words get linked to searches on McCain. This is not the first time Chris Bower at MyDD has led a Google bomb campaign. In October 2006, the NYT reported on Bower’s campaign against 50 Republicans, including Arizonan John Kyl.

A Google search on “John McCain” currently turns up almost all “favorable” results. McCain’s own sites take up the first five slots; other top listings are “objective” sites: listings of McCain on Congresspedia, the Congress Votes database, collected stories from the Washington post, CNN, and CBS News. The NYT endorsement is tenth, and a story in TechCrunch positive to McCain’s taking on Google and Yahoo! is 12th ranked. The only negative link in the top 20 is RealChange.org’s page on McCain’s skeleton closet, and they have a negative page on everybody.

by WonkoSteve

OK, you were probably thinking:  Isn’t one enough?  But no, based on past State of the Union Speeches, WonkoKevin was able to discern four: Domestic Bush, Security Bush, Visionary Bush, and last but not least, Legacy Bush.  Read about it in this post at Slate.