Politicians Brave the Internet - With Help

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LOL Look who's podcasting! No, it's not your teenager. It's your senator. Veteran politicians more familiar with turntables and typewriters are enlisting twentysomething computer whiz kids to help them brave the digital world of blogs, podcasts and the Web as they look to connect directly with voters. The 2004 presidential campaign ushered in Internet fundraising and the lightning speed effectiveness of Web logs. The next campaign promises a significant increase in Web-based activities; politicians are responding to the reality.

Few are treating it with a LOL - laugh out loud - attitude. This is serious business. Consider Ari Rabin-Havt, 27, who blogs for a living as a staffer to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., 66. Rabin-Havt's duties include watching the blogosphere for what's being said about his boss and others, and helping manage the blog and other Web-based activities for Reid. Rabin-Havt said the way politicians and their staffs view blogs and other Internet tools is dramatically different from just two years ago when he was helping Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of Massachusetts with his Internet strategy. ``There was a communications staffer who once said to me - in the summer of 2004 - I wouldn't know a blog if it slapped me in the face,'' Rabin-Havt recalled. ``I don't think that attitude exists anymore.''


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John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee and a White House hopeful in 2008, recently showed off a newly designed Web site that features a reality television show that tracks Edwards, up close and personal, as he goes around the country. The former North Carolina senator has favored video blogs, in which individuals submit questions to his site via video and he responds in the same format. ``Where in history has that ever happened?'' asked Ryan Montoya, 32, technology adviser to Edwards, 52. ``He sees the people, and he is able to respond to their questions directly. That's democracy.''

Strategists in both parties say the drive to use new media is simple: It's cheap, easy and more and more people are connected. According to a survey after the last presidential election, reliance on the Internet for political news during the 2004 contest grew sixfold when compared with 1996. At the same time, the Pew Research Center poll showed that 40 percent of Internet users found the Web important in helping them decide for whom to vote. In the 2003-04 election cycle, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean used the Internet to raise tens of millions of dollars and stun his primary rivals early in the campaign. He easily surpassed Republican Sen. John McCain, who had relied in part on the Internet for his fundraising in 2000.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5836860,00.html