Yeah, I'm like a week behind on this but who cares. This is freakin' hilarious:

hat tip Robert Bluey

A great viral video done by a film maker to support John McCain.

I thought it was a great decision when the Obama campaign decided to do the speech at Mile High, but I think it's going to backfire. The bio video failed to be a good, dramatic, heart felt lead into his speech. Then the U2 music (cue rock concert) The speech, well delivered as always, but so much more about why McCain is bad than Obama good. In fact, Obama was talking about himself when he mentioned about someone having no record and having to attack his opponent to get people to run away from him. Overall it just gave me the aura of celebrity hollywood taking over America. Especially when they showed him on the screens in Times Square. Now fireworks galore and dramatic music? And what the hell was up with them playing Brooks and Dunn at the end of his speech? That was the President's song in 2004. Brooks and Dunn played at OUR convention. Not cool.

Regardless, a lot of great dramatics at Mile High. Lots of great shots, but is it too movie like? I'm typing this as I watch them wave and it's a freakin' movie score. I don't know, just seems off to me.

This announcement botch seems like something you'd more see in a West Wing episode. Young, energetic presumptive Democratic nominee is building up suspense to his VP pick, promises to be historic in announcing via text rather than MSM and the whole thing is fouled up by the darn media who's been around this block before.

Sidenote: It was broke by media but the first senses I got that it was Biden was from twitters by @newmediajim who's been staking out the Biden residence for a few days now and keeping us all updated. So maybe new media does get a mini win?

I have to believe the Obama camp did not plan on their pick being confirmed at 1 am with the text coming at 3 am. All on a Friday night/early Saturday morning. Friday night is usually when people dump the trash to the press (another great WW reference) not announce the second biggest news of their campaign. But the Obama folks should have realized that all this commotion around Biden and then secret service showing up was going to spark of sirens.

The whole text effort was a failure in that it came after the Politico alert and was at 3 am on a Friday night. I'd like to think I can stay out that late still, but last night was not one of them. :) The text I'm sure was a success in the sense it got people to sign up for Obama's list.

The RNC's going to have fun with Biden and it's going to be fun to see Rudy go after him in Denver. I also wonder if McCain does end up picking Romney, does that mean the conventional wisdom of picking a VP to help you pick up electoral votes is out the window? Though I suppose Cheney didn't exactly do much for Bush being from Wyoming.

This is a cool idea from the McCain campaign. Put together a video about the media's love affair with Obama. Put two different soundtracks to it and let the people vote. It's pretty darn good. I voted for option one, but both are below. To vote go here: http://www.johnmccain.com/video/love.htm

Version 1

Version 2

Jon Henke writes on The Next Right about Obama's integrated new media marketing campaign and how a member of Obama's staff will call up an online donor right after they've donated to ask why. Then they'll blog about it, etc.

It's a great exercise to do and one we did somewhat on Giuliani. Doing mini survey's of your online audience doesn't need to be that hard either. One thing we did was put a form on our donation thank you page asking folks why they donated. A lot of folks responded and gave us some good insight into what made them hit that donate button. The same could be done on an email sign up thank you page or even an online survey using poll daddy. It's something campaigns should be doing more of. It's easy and cheap to do and can give you anecdotal information basic analytics can't.

I agree with Patrick Ruffini about the right blogosphere's attacks of my.barackobama.com and it's detriment to our party moving beyond the play-it-safe web campaign. Micah Sifry with TechPresident also has a must read about the new political organization Obama has built up.

Thanks to Jeff again for sending on another interesting story. This time from the Atlantic Monthly on Obama's unprecedented and impressive fund raising apparatus and how he might be this year's hottest start up in Silicon Valley.

David All writes in TechPresident and TechRepublican of another key part of Obama's now famous bitter speech. It's that of Obama praising the open source aspect of his campaign and how it's worked very well for him. I'm obviously on the other side of the aisle from Obama but I've admired his work done on the Internet from the beginning. From the beautiful graphics to the willingness to trust people and be open on the web ... it's been groundbreaking. Like David says, it's too bad Republicans haven't caught on yet, but I know a lot of us are working to try to change that.

I've been meaning to write on this awhile and time ran away from me. One of the Clinton's new tactics for claiming she's actually got a chance at winning is that if they were under the Republican system she would have already won. Now, who would have thought the time would get here that the Democrats would be using Republican systems as a good example. Not I? Nor does Jon Stewart.

Colbert's word of the day on the matter is pretty funny too: