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.

by WonkoKevin

I stepped out of my self-imposed boycott of commenting on anything outside the presidential campaign and used our technology to analyze Bush’s State of the Union speech–last night’s and the ones before it.  I found a progression of four Bushs: The Domestic Bush (2001), The Security Bush (2002-03), The Vision Bush (2004-07), and The Legacy Bush (2008).  For the full story please visit Chris Wilson’s story at Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2183005/nav/tap3/

by WonkoKevin

The popular metaphor right now, in both parties, is the circular firing squad. Candidates are spending more time shooting each other and less time attacking the other side (except if the target is Hillary Clinton, that is). Democrats are worrying the Clinton-Obama mud throwing will disrupt an already planned-for Fall victory party (as if Obama or Clinton supporters are not going to show up or will vote Republican otherwise, yeah…), and Republicans see Mitt Romney fighting a two-front, nasty war with both John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Well, the candidates and their campaigns may be being mean to each other, but it ain’t so in the Wonkosphere. It’s downright nice these days! Oh, it’s been nasty, but most bloggers’ attentions seem to have turned towards being cheerleaders rather than critics.

(more…)

by WonkoKevin

Blogs are not the only social media influencing the campaign. Here are the candidates’ most watched videos on YouTube:

Hillary Clinton–Vote Different (the Apple commercial spoof), 4.3M views

John Edwards–Feeling Pretty, 1.1M views

Rudy Giuliani–Rudy Giuliani in Drag Smooching Donald Trump, 580,000 views

Mike Huckabee–Mike Huckabee Responds to Evolution Question, 2.2M views

John McCain–How Do We Beat the Bitch?, 1.0M views

Barack Obama–Obama Girl, 5.4M views

Ron Paul–Ron Paul Ad, 3.2M views

Mitt Romney–Romney Girls Attack Obama Girl, 600,000 views