The Web on the Candidates

As we mentioned a few days ago, David Colarusso's Community Counts added a new feature that lets voters vote for their favorite video submissions for the upcoming CNN/YouTube Democratic debate. Now Michael Falcone at the New York Times' Caucus has picked up the story, using the feature to find his favorite submitted videos. "In bedrooms, dorm rooms, offices and backyards, the presidential candidates are getting a virtual grilling by a motley group who are among the first to submit video questions for consideration on the CNN-YouTube presidential debate next month," Falcone writes. Some of the videos are wacky, like "Bjorn," who wears a viking helmet and asks how the candidates will deal with immigration, and many like Al Cannistraro are on-point. "What moral and political principles, if any, would guide the development of your own administration’s national security strategy?" he asks. The best way to check watch these all at once is to visit Colarusso's site; he's even added a sidebar highlighting the least-voted-for videos to make sure everything gets seen.

Ben Smith at the Politico writes that Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, has been caught using polls to test out negative attacks on John Edwards and Barack Obama. While this is common practice among campaign pollsters, the world in which they operate has changed. Says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com, "what the Internet has changed is that 10 or 20 years ago, campaigns assumed that if they called a thousand people and shared with them a test of their most closely held strategic options that it was a secret. The Internet changes the ability of a campaign to keep this testing process secret. It makes it very easy for a handful of respondents to connect with reporters who connect with millions of voters."

Last week, Pollster.com posted tag clouds created by Janet Harris that showed the most commonly-used words each candidate used during the Democratic debates. It was a playful exercise that shed some light on the interior workings of the candidates. Now it's the Republicans' turn.

Pollster.com reports that Pollster friend Janet Harris has compiled tag clouds (they're really "word frequency clouds") that visually depict the most-often used words each candidate used in last night's Democratic debate, and the results are perfect illustrations of how great these tag-cloud thingies are.