It must be hard for the McCain campaign given that they pretty much got flanked to the left (Obama) and to the right (Ron Paul) in terms of the nerd audience.
The Obama campaign has a super-slick website. It’s awesome. It provides a great way for supporters to do a lot of work for the campaign. Instead of having real phone banks or using automated dialers, the Obama campaign has people call a call-distributor. You can do five or ten calls from the comfort of your own home.
Instead of spamming, the Obama campaign has Facebook groups. And, in general, the biggest asset is people like my friend Scott (who is not normally very political) who changed his Yahoo! Messenger logo to have the Obama logo and urged me to sign up on the site.
This is not an inherent democrat advantage. Clinton’s website wasn’t nearly this cool. And Ron Paul, after he piqued the interest of a LOT of nominally leftist folk, was able to very effectively use the Internet.
The McCain campaign isn’t nearly as smart. I suspect they didn’t get the right nerd to show them ways to really campaign on the Internet. But, because of the number of people online, they couldn’t just abandon it. So they are spamming. And they aren’t doing a very good job at it. So I’m getting spam from the McCain campaign talking about veteran’s issues (I’m not a veteran) and inviting me to the Ohio “Road to the convention” rally (I haven’t lived in Ohio full time in over a decade) and it’s very clear that they have probably purchased some pretty crappy databases of email addresses.
Now, I’d expect this sort of activity from a spammer. Heck, I still get spam with the old address in Ohio trying to sell me on mortgages and stuff that I see whenever I delete my spam filter. But is it too much to ask that a potential president not be of the same moral character as people who sell herbal penis enlargement pills over the Internet?
Update: I got some more spam. Looks like they think they are mailing my pa, who also doesn’t live in Ohio anymore, either.
I get spam that puts our old address in Ohio in the subject line to look legitimate and convince me to open it. I see it every time I clear out my spam filter.