I read an interesting article this afternoon in Newsweek about the Web Site techPresident.com, which follows the online campaign strategies of prospective candidates. Along with its blogs and links to official campaign and party Web sites, the site includes a constantly-updated tally of how many friends each candidate has on his or her MySpace account.
Not surprisingly, Barack Obama is far and away the most popular, with (as of this posting) 53,206 friends - more than all the other candidates - Democrat and Republican - combined. Hillary Clinton is a distant second with 26, 087, and John Edwards third with 12, 338.
What is surprising is the Republican candidate with the most MySpace friends (drumroll).......Ron Paul. Yeah, I know - who the hell is Ron Paul? He's a 71-year-old GOP congressman and physician from Texas who formed a presidential exploratory committee on Jan. 11.
Paul's got a libertarian ideology (he had actually joined the Libertarian Party in 1987), is against most increases in taxes or government spending and promotes a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Paul has so far garnered 3, 165 friends, far less than his Democrat opponents, but far more than the closest GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, with only 1807 friends.
Whether any of these numbers amount to a hill of beans is rather dubious, given the extreme fickleness of the (mostly) youthful MySpace users, and the obvious fact that people can set up as many accounts as they want.
It's just interesting that this random guy pops out of the wild blue yonder, ahead of the presumed GOP front runners Rudy Giuliani (who currently has a measly 863 friends) and John McCain (the only GOP candidate who has lost friends since last week - a stunning 84.7 percent since the previous week - he's now down to 211).
Giuliani and McCain might believe that social networking sites are mostly a waste of time in their case (which may very well be true), since their potential backers tend to be older, more affluent (and reliable) than those who vote Democrat.
So I wouldn't expect them to bother mounting any attack ads against Ron Paul in the near future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Ron Paul has a damn ugly page.
Last week the BBC posed the question: What is on President Bush's iPod?
Something feels dirty about picturing George Bush in Air Force One listening to his iPod. Kind of like catching your parents in the sack--you know they do it, but you didn't really need that information.
Post a Comment