I’ve seen something hideously distressing regarding fundraising efforts and ethics. At any rate, good to hear that you are past the ill health on your front page, and I’m glad you’re here! This site is so clean looking too! Very nice. Nice to see you again from an old friend who was once S B *

Cam’s comment above, which I agree with perfectly, illustrates just some of the practical difficulties in getting through a primary to a general election. It’s tough to manage and focus a group of people with incredibly varying degrees of self-interest.

Along those lines, Joe Klein nailed it yesterday in an article for Time:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713497,00.html

And, when you take the view to that level, isn’t that really the first job of a president: to define and communicate a vision, then lead and motivate?

Just my thoughts, but that ability in Obama is yet another reason to disable my own cynicism.

And Clark, by the way, is out working for Hillary these days. I don’t think a VP slot, should she get the nomination, is out of the question.

As I tell my friends who ask me who I want to win the nomination, “With Obama it seems that we truly have a chance to affect change within this country, and with Hillary we get nothing but 4 or more years of the same crap that we Americans are sick and tired of.”

We certainly do not need the years and years of political baggage Hillary brings along with her. I can easily see 4 years of gridlocked votes in the Senate and the House because the Republicans hate the Clintons so much. For some reason I don’t see it the same if Obama were president.

I knew mail lists were important, but not so important that it excuses the slightly ickyu way the Obama folks design their index page.

What still appeals to me about Obama is that he’s the first candidate in many years to disable my cynicism.

Of course, I’m still giving him a chance.

Overall, I have to agree with Cam. Obama’s web presence has been very strong and seems much more mature than we’ve seen in the past, Notwithstanding the front page issue (and the disappearance of his podcast), they seem to have a strong modern view of online campaigning.

I’d marginally disagree with Cameron on one point. I’d term many of the folks who gravitate to these campaigns as, well, ambitious. In some cases, it’s ambition fed by a real belief in a greater goal. In some, it’s ambition for purely personal reasons. That’s not so different than a lot of other work environments. There are “climbers” everywhere. I met quite a few altruistically-motivated people in the Clark campaign in ‘04 (Cameron among them) – folks who really believed in the candidate and saw the work as something of a higher calling. I wouldn’t paint the entire population of political workers with a broad brush, though there are clearly some involved with blindly self-seeking motives.

What some people are not understanding is that a database of email addresses and potential contributors is the “golden egg” of every campaign. This database gets used, re-used, abused, sold, re-sold to every other campaign, PAC, 501.3c and affiliated organization in the future – no matter the outcome of the election cycle. This database is what drives the fund raising – and if you need to know anything about campaigns it is that without fund raising you are essentially dead in the water.

That aside, I am quite impressed by Obama’s web site and online campaigns. He seems to be everywhere, advertising on the political blogs and elsewhere. If I weren’t so disgusted with the entire political industry I’d have found my way into his campaign a while back. But no, I’m done with politics. Probably, for good. My skin is thick but not thick enough to deal with the slime that the political industry attracts. Nasty, nasty people…

How much did you grow the email list this [week | month | quarter | year | whatever ]?

Given that, it becomes less surprising that these sites tend to be… ahem… *aggressive* in their attempts to gather email addresses.

And where’s the paypal button?

Full Disclosure: I live in Utah. It doesn’t matter how I vote.