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.

The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.

That film is Running With Arnold, directed by former entertainment reporter Dan Cox. The doc tracks Arnold Schwarzenegger's wild ride from Austrian yokel to world-class bodybuilder--and then from action superstar to titan of Sacramento. The film is comprised of old interviews with Arnold, new interviews with Arnold's detractors, clips from Arnold's movies, and footage shot during the whirlwind recall election that first put him in office. It's an extremely entertaining piece of propaganda, one which seems content to settle for knowing laughs from the choir in lieu of offering the kind of hard analysis that might actually convert skeptics.

Cox identifies Schwarzenegger's Achilles heel early on, with a clip from an ancient archival interview in which the young bodybuilder describes his unquenchable thirst for attention. As Cox tells it, a defining moment came while Schwarzenegger was serving in the Austrian military. He went AWOL in order to enter a bodybuilding competition, and when he returned to his unit, he was promptly thrown in jail. Not for the first time, the future Governator chose physical vanity and personal stardom over national duty. No doubt this is a dubious personality trait, and an embarrassing anecdote. But like most of the revelations in Running With Arnold, it's hardly the kind of thing that will make a dent in Schwarzenegger's career.

It's rare for a film festival to spotlight major political figures. But earlier today, former Bush Administration officials appeared on a panel alongside filmmakers Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney to discuss their Sundance Documentary Competition entry, No End in Sight. First-time director Ferguson described the picture, which premiered here in Park City on Monday to standing ovations from both festival attendees and press, as pointedly non-partisan. Instead he aimed at creating a cohesive historical record of the mistakes made in the first year after the Iraq invasion. "I don't want it to be seen as having an ideological bent," Ferguson explained. He added: "I wanted it to be a simple accounting of what occurred. Because what happened was so stunning.... I thought that we would all be best served by showing what happened."

The panel, moderated by journalist David D'Arcy, brought together five interview subjects from No End, including U.S. Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton; former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was kidnapped in Kuwait during the first Iraq war and was placed in charge of a Baghdad for a short time after the 2003 invasion; and Omar Fekeiki, the former office manager of the Washington Post Baghdad bureau. Two former Administration officials participated via satellite: Lawrence Wilkerson (who was Colin Powell's chief of staff) and Jay Garner (who was head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq).

D'Arcy led the panel through a discussion of some of the major points made by the film, including the Administration's refusal to stop the looting that erupted immediately after the fall of Baghdad. "I was in the push to Baghdad," recalled Lieutenant Moulton. "There's this mistaken perception that the Marines in Baghdad couldn't have done something to stop the looting. In truth, we were told not to. We certainly had enough troops to stop the looting right there in Baghdad."

"While the American officials in Baghdad were trying to figure out what to do," said Fekeiki, "we were deceived by what they were telling the press, that everything was planned perfectly. People were building their hopes high, because they all thought we would be liberated, and that we would start rebuilding the country in six to eight months."

The much-buzzed Grace is Gone stars John Cusack as Stanley, a conservative, middle-American father of two who has just learned that his soldier wife has been killed in Iraq. Deliberately paced and remarkably tender, the film defies expectations by avoiding political statement in favor of intimate portraiture. In the context of Sundance, a festival known for showcasing polemics, that in itself feels like a revelation.