Another word on blogs . . .

Here is an interesting article on Hillary Clinton and what she is doing in the way of blogging as the 2008 Democratic primary race comes to an end. Read this article I pulled from the New York Times:

May 20, 2008

As Primaries End, Clinton Appeals Directly to Blogs
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
As Hillary Rodham Clinton decries the mainstream media for diminishing her chances of capturing the Democratic nomination, she is turning more to the Internet to make her increasingly urgent case.
She held her first blogger-only conference call on Friday, phoning in to about 40 bloggers from the campaign trail in Oregon.
And the campaign has stepped up its use of Twitter, a social-networking service that sends short, text-based posts, to make real-time calls to arms.
The push on the Internet comes amid signs that Mrs. Clinton is getting less attention these days, both in the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Techpresident.com reports that according to the blog search tool Technorati, Mrs. Clinton is being mentioned less than half as often as Senator Barack Obama in the blogosphere and that mentions of her have even slipped below those of Senator John McCain.
And the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks the weekly coverage of the candidates in various media, reports that Mrs. Clinton was a significant factor in 53 percent of the coverage last week, compared with 68 percent for Mr. Obama.
The purpose of the conference call was to thank bloggers for their support, deliver her talking points and have those talking points conveyed to the blogosphere — and ultimately to the superdelegates who may control the outcome of the race.
“Your voices make a real difference, and your engagement in these incredibly significant ways helps to set the ground for what we are trying to say in the campaign,” she told them, adding that they can “influence the rest of the blogosphere and beyond.”
Her campaign has been reaching out to bloggers for a couple of years now and has exploited the Internet, particularly for fundraising and rapid-response messaging. Her Democratic opponent, Mr. Obama, has been credited with using it better, especially for organizing and social networking. But Mr. Obama himself has yet to join a blogger-only conference call.
(Oddly, perhaps, Mr. McCain — the likely Republican nominee who, at 71, jokes about being older than the Internet itself — holds blogger conference calls regularly, though his online fund-raising lags behind his Democratic rivals. )
While Mrs. Clinton started her campaign with the netroots and many in the blogosphere against her, partly for her vote to authorize the Iraq war, several bloggers have become more sympathetic over the course of the long campaign.
On the call, she apologized to them for the bile they confront for defending her.
“I deeply regret the vitriol and the mean-spiritedness and terrible insults and rhetoric that has been thrown around at you, for supporting me, at women in general, at many of those who support my campaign because of who they are and their stand based on principle,” she said.
“But this too shall pass,” she reassured them. “I don’t have time for their insults. I’m impervious to them. I figure it’s a perverse form of flattery that they would spend so much time and energy trying to tear me down when what we need to be doing is figuring out how we’re going to swear in a Democrat next January 20.”
Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said the call had been planned for a while but had to be postponed a couple of times.
So it was coincidental that her first blogger call came during the first week in which Mrs. Clinton had been edged out of the media’s campaign narrative. Many in the M.S.M .have concluded that mathematically, she can’t win. And on that particular day, most political coverage was devoted to the back-and-forth between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain.
But the call seemed to signal a more aggressive use of the Internet as time runs out on her quest for the nomination.
All campaigns have been using Twitter, for example, to notify their supporters of campaign events.
Mrs. Clinton is also using it now to gather signatures on a petition urging the Democratic National Committee to count the votes and delegates from Florida and Michigan.
She used Twitter again on Monday to ask her supporters to make calls to voters in Kentucky and Oregon. That message linked them to “the Hillary Clinton volunteer calling tool,” which allows them to call voters through the Internet, read a script, record the answer and submit the answer to the Clinton campaign so it can get out the vote on Tuesday.
The idea is to drive up her popular vote in hopes of bolstering her argument to superdelegates that, as she put it during the blogger call, she will “end the elections on June 3 ahead in the popular vote” (by counting Michigan and Florida, of course) and that she is more electable than Mr. Obama.
The M.S.M. have heard those arguments before and have essentially stopped transmitting them. But on the conference call, Mrs. Clinton gave full voice to them (though she was hoarse).
Heralding the message she would make on the campaign trail on Monday, she elaborated on her electoral argument _ that she can win in the fall because she has won states with a total of 300 electoral votes, while Mr. Obama has won states with only 217 electoral votes.
“I have a cushion on the electoral vote majority, and he has a significant deficit,” she said.
She said it was “especially important that we try to get people to start focusing on this,” adding, “I think that is the appropriate criteria on which to base a decision. I believe that I have a very powerful case there.”
(She was so thrilled to learn on Monday that Karl Rove, President Bush’s erstwhile strategist, had reached a similar conclusion that she trumpeted the news on the campaign trail, even though Mr. Rove is not a credible source for many Democratic primary voters.)
Electoral votes, of course, are irrelevant to the primary process and when her campaign first proposed this metric in March, the MSM dismissed it.
The delegate math is what counts, and it’s against her. Mr. Obama leads by about 150 delegates and is closer to the final number needed.
To help bloggers counter that notion, Mrs. Clinton tried out a new slogan on the conference call: “It is the map, not the math.”
The “map/math” phrase quickly found its way to various blogs, including Talkleft and Riverdaughter. Some, like Jerome Armstrong on MyDD examined the “map/math” argument in detail.
This in turn prompted a wider discussion in the blogosphere. Many rejected it, to put it mildly. Some, like Outsidethebeltway.com were dubious of her logic but still put the phrase in its headline and in the end concluded that it may be a “defensible” point -- if the only one she has left.
Mrs. Clinton started her campaign as the candidate of the establishment. It may be a measure of how far she has come -- or fallen, in the eyes of her critics -- that she is now using the megaphone of insurgents.

I thought folks might find this interesting!