Obama, Clinton use domain names in political battle.
Politicans’ ineptness with domain names can be downright hilarious. But apparently presidential candidates are getting a bit more savvy this election season.
ABC news and Wired have discovered a number of domain names registered by Obama and Clinton to attack each other. Here’s one example from Wired:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign quietly registered VotingPresent.com and VotingPresent.org in early December. Though no websites have gone up on the domains (which were first reported by ABC News), it’s a fair bet the sites won’t be promoting election-themed Christmas gifts: “Voting present” refers to a parliamentary maneuver in the Illinois Legislature that allows a lawmaker to abstain from voting on a particular measure.
The obscure procedural move became national election news Thursday, when The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that Clinton rival and former Illinois state senator Barack Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times in his eight years in the post, sometimes on key issues like abortion.
The Times story marks the zenith of a rhetorical arc Clinton launched Dec. 3, when she first slammed Obama’s non-votes in a speech in Iowa. We now know her campaign registered and squirreled away the domain names the next day — a move that signals candidates’ growing use of highly focused microsites to buff their own images and to throw mud at opponents, from a safe distance.
It’s encouraging that these campaigns are thinking about the strategy of registering multiple domain names are part of an overall strategy. Clinton’s campaign also has a microsite at AttackTimeline.com targeted at Obama’s campaigning.
Obama’s campaign is getting in on the action with DesperationWatch.com.
Ramiro says
Funny!
I’ll be glad to sale politicalmoron.com, politicallyretarded.com, or campaigndirt.com to the highest bidder 🙂
I really enjoy election season!