8:43 PM EST: For the last few years, my polling station has been located at Saint Peter's Church in midtown Manhattan. This small house of worship is an ecumenical outpost of the massive Citicorp Center--a supposed terrorist target back in 2004. But the mood there this morning, as Super Tuesday got underway, was decidedly sleepy. I was the only voter on hand. I was issued a green registration card, which I surrendered to a patient-looking man in khakis next to the booth. Then I parted the curtains and stepped inside to play my infinitesimal part in the great democratic experiment. In most of this state, we still use mechanical lever machines--descendants of the Myers Automatic Booth, which made its debut in Lockport, New York, in 1892. The red lever and the little tabs for individual candidates are products of the Industrial Age, and will no doubt be supplanted by digital technology any minute now. But I'll miss the satisfying clank as you move the lever to the right, then back to the left. The mechanical sound indicates that you have accomplished something. Still, the polling station fell silent again as I exited. Super Tuesday was feeling rather anticlimactic in midtown.


Elsewhere, though, the excitement was mounting. By lunchtime, Mike Huckabee had won the West Virginia primary, aided by a procedural spat between the McCain and Romney camps. The next state to close its polls was Georgia, at 7:00 PM EST, and there Barack Obama sailed to a clear victory over Hillary Clinton, gaining substantial support from the state's black population. Seven additional states closed their polls at 8:00 PM, and by now, the results of what is essentially a national primary are coming in thick and fast. John McCain is looking to be the victor in New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, and Illinois--not bad for a guy who was written off as a penniless joke just a few short months ago. Massachusetts gave its delegates to Mitt Romney, who either resuscitated the state or destroyed it during his tenure as governor (it all depends on who you ask). Hillary Clinton, who must have originally conceived of Super Tuesday as her political Sweet Sixteen party, has won in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. But the tug-of-war between her and Obama is still underway in a number of populous states, including Connecticut, New Jersey, and what is widely perceived as a Clinton stronghold, her electoral equivalent of Helm's Deep: that would be New York. Who will be the last man (or last woman) standing? Check in throughout the night, as we update this post. And in the meantime, take a look at this Super Tuesday photo gallery.

9:18 PM EST: Just 30 minutes ago, things were beginning to look a little grim for Hillary Clinton. Although she had cleaned up in a number of early contests, including Arkansas and Tennessee, Obama was nipping at her heels all over the Eastern Seaboard. Well, things have firmed up for her since then. First she took Massachusetts, where Obama, having obtained the endorsement of local icon Teddy Kennedy--and the slightly less iconic John Kerry--had real hopes of prevailing. No such luck. Clinton soon added New York to her tally: a loss in her home state would have been mortifying, but even the Obama camp recognized this as an unlikely outcome. And at 9:18, ABC News projected her as the winner in New Jersey.


A close contest between the Democratic contenders will surprise nobody. What's more intriguing is the strong showing made by Mike Huckabee throughout the South and West. In Alabama--which, according the ABC News, saw "the biggest evangelical vote ever"--he won with 48 percent, and he's currently leading in Missouri as well, with 37 percent to John McCain's 30 percent. And elsewhere, in Tennessee and Oklahoma, he's trailing McCain but leaving Mitt Romney in the dust. It may be that Romney's attempt to peel the conservative block away from McCain has worked all too well--but those voters are defecting to the former Arkansas governor instead of pulling the lever for the eerily telegenic Mitt. Could this boost Huckabee's chance of landing a vice-presidential berth? Probably. Meanwhile, Romney is pinning his hopes on California, where evangelicals are thinner on the ground and his high-tech credentials have a better chance of wooing the voters.

Like the average American, I'm getting my Super Tuesday results from the TV. George Stephanopoulos looks half his age. Diane Sawyer looks half her age--maybe half his age. But if you want something more futuristic, Google has obliged with an automatically updated chart and a map whose exact purpose I haven't figured out yet. Enjoy!

11:25 PM EST: At 10:13, Obama was declared the winner in North Dakota, and by 10:31, he won in Minnesota as well. Was the pendulum now swinging away from Hillary Clinton? Perhaps. But as one of the talking heads pointed out, the two Democratic candidates were still heading for a photo finish in terms of the popular vote. They had split the 6.4 million votes cast so far right down the middle, with less than 200,000 votes separating them. The outcome in California, where the polls are just about to close, will make all the difference.


Over on CNN, Romney addressed his followers in Boston. In a dark suit, surrounded by a sea of bright red baseball mitts, he told the crowd he wasn't giving up. The good news: his former zip codes were kind to him. "There was a special feeling in my heart when I realized that the three places where Ann and I lived have all voted for us: Michigan, Massachusetts, and Utah!" Without a Romney victory, he prophesied, "America will emerge as a second-tier power." The only thing standing between us and mediocrity are "the values of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and Teddy Roosevelt." The absence of the current president from this pantheon was hard to miss; so too was Romney's pledge to stop illegal immigration, a dagger aimed quite clearly at John McCain's heart. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt, screamed the crowd, as he administered his final jab: "I think it's important to have a president who's actually had a job in the private sector!"

Back in the Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer was dwarfed by the giant wall of monitors, logos, graphics, and charts. He promenaded up and down the red-and-blue ramp--a pundit's Yellow Brick Road--and announced that McCain had won in Arizona. The good news: McCain didn't drop the ball in his own state. The bad news: the Arizona conservatives had deserted him for Romney, who picked up 47 percent of their votes. Might Mitt be bouncing back after all? (By 11:12, Romney would be declared the winner in Minnesota as well.)

At 10:50 Blitzer cut over to Hillary Clinton, addressing her own crowd in New York City. The senator, in a sharp yellow suit, found it hard to quiet the audience. Both Chelsea and Bill--apparently not banished to Antarctica after all--were briefly in evidence behind the podium. But now she began to speak: "Tonight, we are hearing the voices of people across America." Nutty cheers. "People of all ages, all colors, all faiths, and all walks of life." As usual, there was something mechanical about her delivery, plus she was hoarse, but this was clearly a delightful moment for her. "And it's not over yet--the polls are still open in California for a few more minutes!" The speech went on and on, but what caught my eye was the "Latinos for Hillary" sign prominently displayed over the candidate's left shoulder. In Arizona, Clinton picked up only 53 percent of the Latino vote to Obama's 44 percent, and that's the sort of margin she clearly wants to widen.

At 11:18, the first returns start to trickle in from California. With a picayune two percent of precincts reporting, Clinton is leading Obama 57 percent to 32 percent. Of course it's too early to tell, but if she sweeps California with these sort of numbers, she may actually land the knockout blow that has eluded her all night--and all fall and all winter.

12:30 AM EST: CNN just projected a Clinton win in California, by a wide margin. No doubt the champagne corks are popping in Chappaqua. But Obama's coast-to-coast performance tonight, and the stemwinder he delivered to a rapt crowd in Chicago, can't possibly be discounted. His resilience as a candidate--along with that of Mike Huckabee, who motivated evangelical voters across the South--is among the major lessons of Super Tuesday.

MSNBC stars Tim Russert and Brian Williams

Overlooked story: CNN Beats Out Fox News and MSNBC in New Hampsire
Submitted by: TimALoftis

As recent media reports have pointed out, the presidential race isn't just between Hillary, Obama, and McCain, but the three big cable networks: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. And if CNN has long trailed behind Fox in the ratings race, the network placed first during the recent New Hampshire primary. According to the New York Times, CNN had 3.3 million viewers, nearly double the number of viewers during the 2004 New Hampshire primary, while Fox had 3.06 million viewers and MSNBC, which claimed 1.64 million viewers.

"This was one of the first times that CNN overtook Fox in quite a while," says Steve Krakauer, associate editor at TV Newser. "So it came as a bit of a surprise." According to Krakauer, CNN first raised its profile last summer by broadcasting the YouTube debates. Since then, the network has aggressively marketed itself to viewers, adopting the "Best Political Team" tag line, while bringing in special guests such as Carl Bernstein and Bill Bennett to round out coverage by longtime anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper. Additionally, this week CNN announced a new nightly show, CNN Election Center. According to the AP, the show will air opposite competitors Bill O'Reilly on Fox and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Sharpening its election coverage, Fox has shuffled programming, having Greta Van Susteren and Shepard Smith report together in a pairing that's unique for the network since the two don't usually share air time, according to Krakauer. The network is also prominently featuring longtime duo Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. For its part, MSNBC is using Tom Brokaw as a special correspondent, while continuing to plug longtime anchors Tim Russert and Brian Williams, as well as Olbermann and Chris Matthews of Hardball.

Increased eyeballs translate to increased advertising dollars for the cable networks, points out Anthony Crupi, senior editor at Mediaweek. And given the WGA strike, is there anything better to watch? According to Crupi, some of the cable networks are quietly pitching the election to advertisers as the "ultimate reality television" show. "The fact that these debates can be factious is helping ratings," says Crupi.

If MSNBC's Russert raised his profile by covering the elections in 2000, and the same gig helped to make Ashley Banfield a star in 2004, there haven't been any breakout stars spotted at the news desk this season, according to Crupi. "My guess is that the networks want to have more established newspeople," says Crupi. "It's such a wide open field, and they want a sense of gravitas."

Nevertheless, with February's Super Tuesday primary elections looming, expect the competition between the networks to heat up as even more viewers to tune in. "People are generally interested in this process," says Crupi.

Since the launch of the NewsQuake blog earlier this year, we've featured quite a few interviews, with personalities as diverse as Geoff Emerick, Michael Musto, William Langewiesche, Rob van Hattum, and Carlo Bonini. In all these cases, we've welcomed comments from visitors. However, this top-down approach didn't feel quite right for a social news site. To a great degree, it still left the community on the margins, which contradicts the fundamental fact about any social news site: the community belongs in the center ring.

So we're going to try a different approach. Below you will find the subjects of three impending interviews here at Propeller. What we're asking is for community members to submit questions in advance. We can't promise that all questions will be included in the final product--there may be duplicates, or questions that simply don't fit into the conversation. We will also experiment with different ways of integrating these questions: they may be threaded into the interview proper, or grouped at the end as a kind of lightning round. But we hope as many members as possible will join the party. We'll probably set up a mail queue for this express purpose, but for now, please do send those questions to James Marcus via Propeller site mail. Here are the subjects, folks, along with some relevant information about each one:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Francis Ford Coppola is the writer and director of such classic films as The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). His new film, Youth Without Youth, is based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade, and will open in the U.S. in December.

ALEX ROSS
Alex Ross writes about classical music for The New Yorker (and occasionally contributes profiles of such hard-to-pigeonhole performers as Björk). He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was just chosen by The New York Times as one of The Ten Best Books of 2007. Ross blogs about his many musical interests at The Rest Is Noise.com.

GARRETT M. GRAFF
Garrett M. Graff is the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com, and was the first blogger ever to cover a White House press briefing. While still a teenager, he worked on Howard Dean's campaign, serving as the candidate's first webmaster. He is currently an editor-at-large at Washingtonian magazine, and is about to publish The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. You can learn more about him here, and check out his personal blog here.

Let's give credit where credit is due: the opening moments of the YouTube/CNN Democratic debate did promise something out of the ordinary. Instead of being greeted by some elaborately coiffed network drone, the candidates were welcomed by a goateed slacker from Portland, Oregon. You almost expected Wayne Campbell to pop up in the background. True, this Video Everyman quickly ceded the role of ringmaster to Anderson Cooper. But there was at least a whiff of ordinary life afoot, and the applause from the audience at the Citadel suggested the hearty approval and high spirits of a good rock concert.


Cooper, whose jacket looked a little tight across the midriff, first treated viewers to a series of outtakes: in other words, video submissions that were too freaky or facetious to make the cut. There were nutters in Viking hats and chicken costumes. There were quite a lot of children, too--a practice frowned upon by Cooper: "People seemed to use their kids to ask adult questions." The most viewed video on YouTube prior to the debate, which equated Arnold Schwarzenegger with a heroic cyborg, was conspicuously excluded. And Joe Biden was chided for attempting to game the system, a charge he acknowledged with a nod and a wolfish grin.

The opening video, from Zach Kempf of Provo, Utah, immediately threw down the populist gauntlet: "How are you going to be any different?" With public approval of the Democratic Congress plummeting almost as quickly as the president's own ratings, this was a tricky question. The candidates had to position themselves as simultaneous insiders and outsiders, a task fumbled by Christopher Dodd, who huffed his way through some familiar riffs about "new ideas, bold ideas." Barack Obama was quicker on his feet here, insisting that no real progress will be made "unless we change how business is done in Washington."

The next question, from Davis Fleetwood of Easton, Massachusetts, was a replay of the first one: "How would America be better off if you were president?" Dennis Kucinich, generally in good form, fired back some rather canned paradoxes: "I believe in duty through honor.... We achieve strength through peace." But Hillary Clinton shaped the question to her own purpose, getting in some non-too-subtle digs at Obama's slender resume. "We are united for change," she granted. "The issue is which of us is ready to lead on Day One."

Obama, meanwhile, took his own shots at the preferred target of every candidate in attendance: the special interests. It's a convenient gambit, since nobody cares to defend bloated energy conglomerates or the insurance industry. Yet the candidates tend to tilt at abstractions, without specifying exactly how these predators would be driven from the governmental chicken coop. "We've got to get the national interest up front," Obama argued, "as opposed to the special interests." Hear, hear. But how?

Next, the contenders were handed a semantic hot potato: "How would you define the word liberal?" Depending on your view of Clinton, she either hit that one out of the park or did one of the end runs so favored by her nimble husband. The word, she explained, "has been turned on its head... [and] made to describe big government. I prefer the word progressive," she said, with the satisfied look of somebody who's conquered a particularly vicious tongue-twister. "I consider myself a proud, modern, American progressive." Mike Gravel, to the amusement of the crowd, refused to endorse either epithet. Then he went on to denounce the whole pack, promising that "you're not going to see any change if these people get elected." (He also accused Obama of lining his pockets with contributions from Swiss financial giant UBS. You head it here first: if Obama gets elected, look for compulsory cuckoo clocks and the immediate relaxation of cheese tariffs.)

And so it went. Asked to name his favorite Republican, John Edwards got in his licks at those damn special interests: "I have been fighting these people my entire life, and beating them." A question about reparations for slavery elicited a negative answer from Edwards, an evasive one from Obama ("I think the reparation we need right here in South Carolina is investment in our schools"), and an attack by Kucinich on... special interest groups.

It took a few more questions about race to jog the candidates out of their populist rut. For example: was Obama an authentic black person? Here, it must be admitted, was a question that never would have made it past the radar--or at least the decorum--of a conventional debate panel. And Obama had an amusing, non-automatic answer: "When I had to catch a cab in Manhattan in the past, I was given my credentials." On a more serious note, he noted his belief "in the core decency of the American people," and insisted that the elimination of social and economic disparities "is what will solve the race problem in this country."

A question about gay marriage also produced some unusually straight (as it were) talk. Kucinich said yes, while Dodd, Richardson, and Edwards all stuck by the man-and-woman model for holy matrimony. Edwards seemed to want some credit for his tortured conscience ("I feel enormous personal conflict about this issue"), and then shifted into reverse with his statement that no official may use his faith "to deny anybody their rights. I will not do that as president." Does this mean he would support gay marriage as public policy while personally viewing it with disapproval? A follow-up might have been helpful, but Cooper--who generally did press the candidates for specifics--had already moved along.

Next: foreign policy. A video filmed near a refugee camp in Darfur put that issue on the table, and opened up some interesting fissures among the field. Biden came out in favor of immediate American intervention. "Where we can," he exclaimed, "America must!" This may smooth over the complications of dropping 20,000 U.S. troops into a war-torn African nation, but as a call to arms, it was pretty stirring stuff. Bill Richardson argued for diplomacy and a U.N. peacekeeping force; Clinton added to that divestment and a no-fly zone. When pressed by Cooper, she did draw an additional line in the sand: "American ground troops do not belong in Darfur at this time."

How novel, and how refreshing, to hear some specifics! Half the time the candidates still hedged, and flailed away at the straw man of the special interests; but the rest of the time, this interrogation by the vox pop did seem to prompt some actual answers. When would the assembled company withdraw all American troops from Iraq? They named their dates--April 2008 (Dodd), January 2008 (Richardson), July 2007 (Kucinich)--or at least attempted to explain why they thought a specific timetable was impractical. Biden also put in a pitch for partitioning Iraq into a loose confederation, and ridiculed the pie-in-the-sky scenarios floated by his colleagues. "Time to tell the truth," he practically snorted. "It would take one year to physically withdraw 160,000 troops from the country."

Before the event wrapped up, Gravel got off another jeremiad ("The Clintons and the DLC sold out the Democratic Party to Wall Street!") and everybody raised a hand for an increased minimum wage. It's hard to say who won, or at least dominated the evening's political theater. Edwards, his blue eyes luminous in close-up and with a bit of Nixonian perspiration on his upper lip, turned in a solid, imperturbable performance. Biden made a good case for himself as the grizzled realist. Kucinich and Gravel staked out the margins, with Richardson and Dodd in the less-than-captivating center.

And again, Obama and Clinton failed to knock each other out of the running. The latter couldn't help but stand out, wearing a shiny salmon-colored jacket that her detractors will inevitably deride for its Dragon Lady overtones. But Clinton has shed much of the robotic demeanor that dogged her senatorial campaigns. And despite one pointed question about the evils of dynastic rule, she has delicately put some distance between herself and Bill, and learned to project mature competence and the odd glint of spontaneity. Obama still seems awfully young; you wonder whether he's ever shaved. On the other hand, he can play the outsider card much more effectively than Hillary, and his distance from the business of politics-as-usual may yet tip the balance in his favor.

That leaves the process itself. It would be hard to argue that the voices of ordinary men and women dramatically changed the rules of the game. In many ways, it was a political debate like any other in this country--meaning not a debate at all, but a Kabuki-like ritual in which the candidates studiously ignored each other and refused to budge from their comfort zones unless the moderator waved a flaming brand in their faces. Yet there were moments of candor and specificity that were truly encouraging, and made me curious to see how the Republican field fares with the same YouTube-driven procedure. The questions from the citizenry weren't more probing or smart than the standard fare, but they were often attractively blunt. More to the point, they were posed by human beings, rather than by maniacally triangulating pollsters or focus groups. And sometimes, at least, the candidates seem determined to answer in the same spirit. Can that be bad?

With tonight's vox-pop-driven Democratic debate just hours away, it seemed like a good moment to ask a fundamental question: does our electoral system reward the most agile fudging, evasion, and outright fibbing? At the Milken Conference back in April, moderator Roger Ailes posed the question in somewhat different terms. "Can a presidential candidate advance serious and even unconventional ideas," he asked, "while unyieldingly telling the truth--and win the presidency?" In the video below, panelists Arianna Huffington and Ken Mehlman answer at length. Even more impressively, the high-profile progressive and the former RNC chairman come to similar conclusions about the role of honesty on the stump.

Back in April, Netscape sent a crew to the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. Over the course of several days, Alexia Prichard and Dakota Smith covered an assortment of events, most of them featuring heavy hitters from the worlds of politics and culture. In this first video installment of their coverage, the topic is the impending Super Primary in February 2008, and the participants cover what we might call the ideological waterfront: Mort Zuckerman, Arianna Huffington, Ken Mehlman, Bill Frist, and Harold Ford Jr. The moderator is the ever frisky panjandrum of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Enjoy!

If nothing else, last night's Republican presidential debate will certainly narrow the field. Those who have no shot: Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, Tommy Thompson, Sam Brownback, and Tom Tancredo. They represent the fringe of the fringe. Mitt Romney will probably last until The Final Three, but only because he's such great television.

Let's get more specific. Gilmore said nothing memorable the entire evening. Brownback made it clear that he would pardon Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Thompson, venturing into some private Twilight Zone, promised to employ George W. Bush as a "youth ambassador," sending him out "to lecture about honesty and integrity." And Hunter brought some unwelcome levity to his discussion of the Secure Fence Act: "If they get across my fence, we sign 'em up for the Olympics! Immediately!" In a heated segment on immigration reform, the punch line was perfectly timed, but nobody laughed. I think we were all a little unsure about whether or not we were supposed to. And that pretty much sums up the overall tone of the debate. All night the candidates lobbed soft ones, and nobody was there to catch them.

Tancredo's blooper was a little more complicated. During the discussion of English as America's "official language," he said: "We're testing whether or not we will actually survive as a nation. Whether we can actually hold together--and hold onto something called the English language. We are becoming a bilingual nation and that is not good." I can't decide if I'm more afraid because he's a segregationist, or because he's unaware that we are a nation of many languages, not just two.

As a Democratic observer of last night's debate, I find myself at much more of a loss than I could have imagined. There was some humor in the discussion, but there was also horror. Specifically: when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked the ten candidates whether they would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, only one--Ron Paul--said no.

We're in the middle of a war that few Americans like or want to continue, and these guys can't take a drink of water without talking about getting us into another one. And a nuclear war at that! Think about what supporting one of these candidates would mean: you're pulling the lever for vaporization. Is that a viable choice?

Honestly, if I was a Republican, I'd vote for John McCain. You can't fake sincerity like his. And the senator from Arizona had a good night, even if his heart doesn't seem to be in it anymore, and even if he was browbeaten for his bipartisan immigration bill. To his credit, he rallied and came away with the most emotionally powerful moment of the evening. Regarding Spanish--my native language, and one much maligned by Rep. Tancredo--McCain said: "[This is] a language which has enriched my state. My friends, I want you, the next time you're down in Washington DC, to go to the Vietnam War Memorial and look at the names engraved in black granite. You'll find a whole lot of Hispanic names. If you go to Iraq today you'll see a lot of folks with Hispanic names. These are people who love this country so much they're willing to sacrifice for it. Let's, from time to time, remember that these are God's children."

What we got, then, were mostly variations on the same theme. Disagreements did erupt, of course. John Edwards, with his sagging poll numbers, was quick to deny the actual existence of the War on Terror. "It's a bumper sticker!" he insisted. "It's a political slogan. That's all it is, that's all it's ever been." Hillary Clinton was having none of this--which is to say that no senator from New York can afford such a rhetorical ploy. But even as the discussion about Iraq heated up, Joe Biden rushed in with a Band-Aid. "I don't want to judge them!" he remarked, when the schoolmarmish but efficient Wolf Blitzer asked him to condemn his colleagues for their votes on the latest round of war funding. "They worked hard! These are my friends!" And not too much later, Clinton added: "The differences among us are minor."

There's an interesting story in today's Washington Post (submitted to Netscape by TechnologyExpert), in which various pundits and GOP operatives wring their hands over the Republican Party's alleged inability to compete with Democratic candidates on the internet. An excerpt:



As that excerpt makes clear, the Post's Jose Antonio Vargas chose to focus on the early front runners in both parties, and in doing so, he makes a fatal error by exclusion. The story fails to mention Ron Paul, whose official YouTube channel has a good 2,000 more subscribers than Barack Obama's channel and almost three times as many subscribers as John Edwards'. The Republican underdog is also clearly on the mind of bloggers; his name has been the number one search term on Technorati for several weeks.

I called Ron Paul's Austin-based campaign headquarters to get their take on the Washington Post story. Jesse Benton, Paul's communications director, told me that the Paul campaign was not contacted by the Post in connection with the story. "It is a little ironic that the strongest Republican candidate on the Internet was excluded from a story about Republicans on the Internet. I think that has been a little typical of our treatment in the mainstream media. I also think that is changing--the mainstream media is paying a little more attention to us every day."

All the more ironic is the fact that the Paul campaign has specifically sought to use the Web as a tool to reach voters in absence of that coveted MSM attention. "The internet is a major part of our strategy," Benton says. "We think it's a powerful force in leveling the playing field and allowing non-Establishment candidates, without nationwide name-recognition at this early point in the campaign, to be able to stand up on the same platform with self-anointed--or mainstream media-anointed--front runners." Benton attributes Paul's online success in no small part to his message. "He is the leading advocate for Internet freedom in Congress: he has never voted to tax the Internet or regulate it in any way. People who have a presence on the Internet realize that he is their strongest champion."

So why exclude the Paul camp from the story? I've contacted Vargas and will update this blog post when I get a response.

Our top story on Netscape last night and this morning was this op-ed from left-wing blog SmokingPolitics, predicting a nasty political fight for Al Gore once his new book, The Assault on Reason, is released next week. Bloggers Dave Johnson and James Boyce say this event will give the Left the perfect opportunity to draw attention to "the mechanism of the smear":


With an excerpt from The Assault live on TIME.com (and at the top of buzz-generated news aggregator Memeorandum) as of this morning, let's take a look at the first responses to Gore's tome. Because bloggers like to talk about themselves debate the nebulous laws governing the Web, let's focus specifically on Gore's statements about network neutrality.

That's the query posed by this story from Politico.com, submitted this morning by Netscape Scout Tim A. Loftis. The most damaging quote in the story comes from none other than the most visible female in the political blogosphere, Arianna Huffington. "Hillary Clinton's problem with the blogosphere is that she has been so calculating that you can smell it," Huffington told Politico's Sam Stein. "Every thought has been processed through multiple channels in her and her consultants' brains. It's so fabricated."

One thing that could be hurting Hillary is her sheer visibility. Good bloggers thrive on making discoveries just off the mainstream radar, and no current candidate has been on the radar for longer than Hillary Clinton. Case in point: the number one search term on Technorati for the past couple of days has been Ron Paul:


The Republican candidate (who ran for President under the Libertarian banner in 1998) likely impressed bloggers at last week's debate with his traditional fiscal conservatism and opposition to the Iraq War. Over the past week, Paul's official YouTube page has outpaced those of his Republican rivals, with 2,199 subscribers to Mitt Romney's 1,899.

The Politico piece is specifically concerned with the upswing of anti-Hillary sentiment. But perhaps a bigger issue is the fact that, according to Technorati, the overall number of mentions of the female candidate by bloggers is on the downswing:


So for today, Paul is up and Clinton is down. But it's best to remember that bloggers are fickle. It's early enough in the race that we'll almost certainly see a Ron Paul backlash, and a backlash to the Hillary backlash, before the first primary.

One of our top stories on Netscape today is a Newshound takedown of Fox News stalwart Bill O'Reilly, who has blamed MSNBC's "far left" slant for the poor ratings of last week's Republican debate. Since the Newshound site exists for the sole purpose of slamming Fox News, its take on the story doesn't exactly come as a shock. "You need to face some facts," Newshound tells O'Reilly. "You've peaked and Keith Olbermann is coming up behind you and MSNBC considers him a great asset."

But do they? According to an AP story circulated by Jossip and The Huffington Post, MSNBC did have to contend with flack from conservatives regarding Olbermann's debate night commentary, particularly concerning Rudy Giuliani, whose team actually called MSNBC to complain. AP's David Bauder suggested that "having Olbermann anchor [a political news event] is the MSNBC equivalent of Fox News Channel assigning the same duties to O'Reilly." In other words, news guys should take care of reporting news, and commentary guys who get paid to ruffle feathers should only be brought in after the fact.