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Which candidate wants your money most?
Tonight I was replying to an email from a friend of mine who wanted to know why I didn’t support Hillary Clinton’s bid for president. That’s a topic for a different post but while looking at each of the candidate’s sites I was struck by something. How important money is to each of them? I grabbed a screen shot of the first screen you’d see on each of their sites.
Lets start with Barack Obama, who’s breaking all kinds of fund raising records.
A donate button and a store link. Seems reasonable, especially considering campaigns these days live and die on fund raising.
On to John McCain:
McCain adds a “Contribute” button to his site. Again seems appropriate, especially considering he has his party’s nomination locked up. He won’t need serious cash for a few months now.
Then there’s Hillary Clinton‘s site:
Wow, it seems that 75% of the first screen you see on her site is dedicated to ways to send her money. This is totally unscientific but I do think it says something about what’s important to them. You make the call.
Lessig on Obama
I’ve been perplexed for some time as to why people have been voting for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. From a purely tactical standpoint she has the least chance of all the Democratic candidates of actually winning the general election. She is simply a divisive candidate that I’ve long felt has a distinct lack of character. Laurence Lessig has posted a video detailing the reasons he supports Barack Obama. As only Lessig can he’s both confirmed my suspicions about Clinton and confirmed my positive impressions of Obama. I had not made the connection between the tactics employed by the Clinton campaign and those employed by Carl Rove as Bush came to power. This is exactly the type of thing that turns me off to politics in general. Do we want to reward this sort of behavior?
I’ve been voting Libertarian for a while now because I’m simply disenfranchised by the whole system. Its been more of a protest vote since both choices have been terrible. Obama has presented me with with the first Democratic candidate I could actually support. Due in no small part to his policy statements on technology issues. More and more its because I’m coming to believe may actually represent a real force for change in American politics.
Chris Ball has posted a transcript of Lessig’s video on his blog.
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