Obama vs. McCain Online

16 June 2008 |permalink | email article

Little has been written about it but the race between John McCain, 71, and Barack Obama, 46, may be decided, in part, by age and their starkly different approaches to online technology.

When McCain wanted Obama to join him in a series of town hall meetings, he dispatched a messenger to hand-deliver the invitation, Politico reported.

“You know, you could have just emailed this,” Obama press secretary Bill Burton told the messenger.

Phil Noble, a Democratic campaign veteran and founder of a non-partisan political news site, compared the campaigns’ respective approaches.

“Every time Obama had seven seconds…in South Carolina he whipped out his Blackberry,” Noble recalled.

McCain’s response, when Politico’s Mike Allen asked him whether he used a MAC or PC: “Neither. I’m an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get.”

As of last week Obama’s barackobama.com social networking site had 926,000 members, and 946,568 Facebook supporters.

McCain, but contrast, had 141,183 Facebook supporters and his McCain Space online signup contains the sentence fragment” “Benefits of joining Team McCain include:” – with nothing following.

The Los Angeles Times noted last month that McCain “is taking a serious drubbing on YouTube,” adding that six of the ten top search results for McCain were to videos critical of the candidate. Obama has a front page of almost entirely favorable clips

“When you’ve run as many campaigns as McCain has, you rely on what’s worked in the past,” said Caleb Clark, founder of a conservative-leaning online software development company.

Undaunted, McCain’s web team believes it has a strong online operation.  “It was good enough in the primaries,” McCain’s deputy e-campaign director said. 

The question is whether Team McCain will be good enough to match Obama’s battle-tested insurgency and more comfortable use of online tools by the fall.

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