Citizentube You Choose '08 - Politubing dream come true

MAN, I feel so out of touch. This has been around a while (a few weeks) but real-life duties were keeping me from highlighting this which is probably the quintessential politubing activity out there today.

YouTube's Citizentube has launched a process by which they will highlight a presidential candidate for a week and you get to virtually townhall with the candidate. This just makes me giddy. Who knows, I may bust out of my shyness and make my own YouTube video finally. Check it out:

Hillary Clinton - a mom's perspective

For those reading this politubing blog, you may have noticed that I had not yet blogged about a pretty obvious candidate - Hillary Clinton. I mean, she's a woman, I'm a woman; she's a mom, I'm a mom; she's a wife, I'm a wife; she's an ex-first lady and a senator, I'm, ummm, not. Anyway, you would think I would relate enormously to her right? Well not so fast...

Let me start off by saying that the reason I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks was due to kids with stomach flus, spring breaks, work-related deadlines, and things like piles of laundry. Now I can imagine Senator Clinton is EXTREMELY intelligent, motivated and WAY more organized that I'll ever dream to be. But it's hard for me to relate to someone that can do so much and supposedly be on par with me. Now it may be that I have a 4 and a 1 yr old, a job, and a super motivated husband who can start his own company while still finish up his full-time UC Berkeley MBA (read "way too busy"). Maybe a few years from now when the kids are grown I'll have more time for grown-up type stuff. But right now my big plan for that time period is to sleep.

Basically we’re not at the same level. Just because she is a woman, that’s not enough to win me over. I think all of the candidates are intellectually capable of understanding where I stand regardless of gender. Of course I would love to see a woman running things and would fully support that. But other than say childbirth (which in my opinion should not be a political issue), most of the political issues that are important to me I would say should be gender neutral. In my opinion, the focus of finding the best presidential candidate needs to be on figuring out who is the most competent, well-intentioned, common-sense type candidate.

So wiping that slate clean, what is my take on Senator Clinton? My first reaction I would have to say is that she's a bit staged. Is that a problem or important? Maybe not, we can't all be Bill. Doing politubing due diligence I’ve checked out many of her YouTube videos. She has the Hillcast videos. Normally I think this is a good approach, but frankly, I tuned out many of her Hillcast videos as they somehow seemed insincere. Maybe because the setting looks like a Phillips soft-light commercial. This notion of “keeping the conversation going”, c’mon- you’re in a mansion with a camera crew and speech writer. Now meet me at Starbucks and we then you can talk to me about keeping the conversation going. Just don’t call it what it’s not. This isn’t some kind of video conference thing. Jab aside, I am glad she’s in the Senate. She is truly a very smart woman with conviction and the means to get things done. That’s a good thing. My favorite Hillcast video is her video on getting troops out of Iraq (apparently others think so too, it’s her most viewed). So I don’t fully agree with all of her plans and actions, for example, I don’t think she should polarize the issue and say “All Democrats should ban together to force the president to change course…” (what about the Republicans). But in this video she’s not playing the female card and is discussing plans for a topic on which she has strong opinions. But in general, the Hillcast keep the conversation going videos, zzzzz. Take a look yourself.

Now watching the videos where she speaks to a crowd, those I felt myself more engaged. My favorite so far was the Rutgers University video. I think for Hillary these are the types of venues she has a better chance of shinning. Maybe not surprisingly I see a trend that her recent videos are more of this type and less “Hillcastish”. Now, I am always annoyed at watching politicans playing up their specific audience (the Red Hat Ladies video) but I fully understand you don’t win the Presidency by simply stating exactly what you believe, damn be all that don’t follow. So OK, I’ll tolerate. In the Rutgers video, Senator Clinton was her eloquent self and because it was set up to be a presentation in front of a crowd, it didn’t feel as contrived as the Hillcast videos. The part of about “Dare to Compete”, that was good. Unfortunately especially because she is a woman, I think she’s going to have to be very, very careful how she presents herself. But in my humble opinion, she needs to just be herself. Don’t overplay the woman/mom/wife card, just be yourself, pretend your gender doesn’t matter. Take a look at Rutgers…

Election 2008 First Quarter Fundraising Results

OK, so now I know why I was getting email bombarded by the Presidential 2008 hopefulls all last week (Hillary Clinton was on a ROLL!). The first quarter campaign finance deadline was looming and now their TubeMogul viewership peak trend makes sense to me, duh...

Now I can't find a cool politubing video explaining the results. If anyone has one, comment away. But this is my take:

Hillary Clinton (What Hill?): $26 million
Barack Obama (Barack oBAM!a): $25 million
Mitt Romney (Mitt I've-got-tons-of-roMONEY): $23 million
Rudy Giuliani (Rudy apparently-not-enough-jewels-IANI): $15 million
John Edwards (President McDreamy is just too fitting, isn't it?): $14+ million
John McCain (John McCan't): $12.5

The Washington Post has a good article about these campaign fundraising results.

I don't know why they need 20 gagillion dollars but if I were a betting lady (and I'm not, I always lose miserably), my money is on Barack oBAMa or Mitt roMoney. Now I am completely unqualified to pass judgment but out of curiosity I looked up who was essentially running John McCain's campaign versus Mitt Romney. My intuition told me McCain is probably using old school political network methods, and Mitt Romney has whiz-bang kid. I mean, this is the founder of BainCapital. Hello...he knows money, as my husband says "Why was it a surprise he could raise money?"

Please, do not quote me but as I understand according to Chris Cilliza from the Washington Post, John McCain's campaign man is Tom Loeffler.

I don't know if they're the same role but one of Mitt Romney's main men is Alex Castellanos. Oh, and apparently the ivory tower word for these savants is "consigliere". Doesn't that just mean "an advisor", why the heck don't they just call them advisors? They must get to wear special tights or a crown or something.

Funny thing is I see Mr. Loeffler mentioned as a consigliere but Mr. Castellanos as I think a strategist. I also read and probably just juicy unfounded gossip that Romney's campaign wants to shy away from anything France-like as they will play the card that people like Hillary Clinton want us to just become a whiny socialist country like France (ca n'est pas possible) so maybe that's why Havana boy is media-guru and Loeffler is still a consiglieremajig.

So the difference in the two:
Tom Loeffler, an ex-Texas Congressman, a lawyer and lobbyist, and obviously politically tremendously well connected. Maybe he's not anymore after this week, who knows. I read this as “old school”.

Alex Castellanos - Media mogul-type man. Not sure how to read this since he’s been the political go-to guy for many but sounds FLASHY to me.

But way more interesting than Castellanos (for me at least) is Mitt Romney's apparent use of SalesForce.com for his campaign fundraising toolset:

Salesforce.com gets into politics by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Mitt Romney’s Republican presidential campaign has raised about $20 million so far in 2007 with the help of “com-Mitt” software for interacting (fundraising) with donors. The activity is otherwise known as CRM, customer relationship management, and salesforce.com's on demand platform is the foundation of com-Mitt. Not one to miss a new, and timely, market opportunity, [...]

Now THERE's a businessman for ya!

Anyway, in my peace and love world, I would collect all the money that the candidates who don't stand a chance collected (why on God's green earth did MORE candidates just make a bid for the presidency??? ), plus the extra gazillion these guys collected, and maybe help pay off our national debt, help our little planet with its fever-thing, make sure our kids don't come butt-last in all areas of education, or make a really pretty park somewhere.

I'm probably not going to be anyone's consigliagagaga anytime soon…

Al Gore 2008? Hmmm

Sidetracking for a moment here. My husband mentioned that Al Gore just bought a Mercury Hybrid. I'm too tired to go verify it right now but he is usually right about these things. He also says the United Auto Workers (an apparent political force) don't tend to back a president that does not buy American. Hmmm, now that the Oscars are winding down, could the VP be looking for the P?

Anyway, it's Monday, I needed levity, here's a fun Al Gore Global Warming spoof video I wanted to share. But for what it's worth, I really liked his Inconvenient Truth documentary...