I signed up for accounts with most of the campaign Web sites several months ago and honestly haven’t been back since. Then yesterday I thought about seeing what I could do with some of the accounts and so I began visiting the sites. I was struck by something, on most of the campaign sites I could ’sign-up’ for an account but not ’sign-in’ on the main page.

Usually when you go to a social networking or just regular old Web site with an account system you are greeted with a “welcome so and so” message which lets you know you are logged in. If you aren’t logged in you can either ’sign-up’ for a new account or ’sign-in’. Not so on most candidates sites where if you aren’t logged in it takes some time to figure out how to get there.

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“Nobody’s going to elect me president of the United States.” (Michael Bloomberg)

I would say Bloomberg put speculation to rest today when transcripts from an interview were released of the NYC mayor telling Dan Rather and HDnet that he wasn’t running for president, but I know better. The idea that Bloomberg was going to run for president was fueled by endless media speculation and a few journalists (I am looking at you Bob Novak) who kept claiming to have “source” feeding them information directly from the candidate.

I have been a pessimist downer about the whole affair from the beginning and I remain that today. Bloomberg will not run for president, he said he won’t run for president, he was saying he wouldn’t run for president way back when this whole thing started and he will be saying it up until election day. With that said, there will no doubt continue to be speculation especially since the news is dead this August.

Michelle Obama made comments that are being interpreted as anti-Hillary saying:

Michelle said she travels with her husband in part “to model what it means to have family values,” adding “if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.” She didn’t elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons. Chicago Sun Times

Drudge and Huffington Post took the “could be interpreted” and are running with it. I for one don’t entirely know if hitting Hillary was what she was going for BUT it is another interesting sign that both Barack Obama & John Edwards are relying on their wives to come out against Clinton (Michelle Obama has said other less veiled things in the past). It is not by any means extraordinary for candidates to have their spouses involved in the campaign but it is newsworthy because the wives of these spouses have and undoubtedly will continue to call into question the first serious female candidate for the presidency.

I understand the motive. Obama & Edwards don’t come across well when hitting Sen. Clinton and if either wants to get elected president they need to get woman onboard their campaign. See the dilemma they face? I do, and I don’t.

You see what Obama & Edwards are really facing isn’t blow-back because they are hitting a woman. They face blow-back because they are hitting a fellow Democrat. This is an election when Democrats and many independents don’t want to see the party destroying each other. Obama & Edwards have tried the hope/change/optimism/we are outsiders 60’s vibe and it isn’t gaining them traction. Every poll I’ve seen lately has Clinton running away nationally and keeping a pretty good hold on the states, Iowa and New Hampshire aside at the moment.

Both of these men face pretty big problems. Obama faces the experience problem, Edwards faces problems of seeming hypocritical and out of touch. Both are running far to the left at the pleasure of those on the left but risk alienating swing voters, independents and moderate democrats. Throwing their wives into the political fray, in my humble opinion, isn’t going to help.

At the end of the day these are two candidates who swore at the beginning of this they wanted to talk about issues and run “different” kinds of campaigns. Now they and their wives are sounding like the same old attack machines that everyone dislikes about candidates only they are doing it by risking the mortality of their party. Clinton is by no means “above the fray” but I don’t think I’ve ever heard her claim to be. I have heard her claim many times that she is running as a fighter and someone who is going to try and clobber the opposition and she too suffers when she hits her Democratic opponents too hard.

There is one other aspect of having the wives club out and attacking. All these questions about men voting for a woman, I don’t know entirely what to think about that. I do know that the same kinds of guys, the moderates and independents who voted for George Bush in 2000 & 2004 are looking for a change. They are the kinds of guys who thought Bush was one of them, a mans man who was going to stand up to bad guys, stop nation building and world policing and stop interfering in their lives. He was the kind of guy who they could have a beer with. He wasn’t the kind of guy who hid behind his wife.

I suspect that when faced with the choice between voting for a strong woman who has experience and who represents what one of these men would like to see their daughter’s and sisters become, I suspect they will vote for Clinton before they do two guys who are backing off and letting their wives fight for them. I don’t know that for a fact but its a hunch I have from talking and studying people.

In the end we aren’t voting for Elizabeth Edwards or Michelle Obama, just as we were not voting for Hillary Clinton in 1992 or 1996 or Laura Bush or Tipper Gore in 2000. We live in a time of war and we stand at a time when war could break out across the entire globe with the slightest misstep. Democrats have the advantage to take over the White House but it won’t be an easy win and how the candidates act now will directly effect their chances a year and a couple months from now.

Kirsten Anderson writes about wikipedia’s role in the 2008 election:

Every day on Wikipedia, the battle for the 2008 election is fought across the candidates’ pages through a steady flow of additions, deletions, edits, and reverts. A study of three days of changes on the candidates’ pages may not be a predictor of popularity or electability, but it certainly is fascinating in its own right.

In terms of activity, on August 17 the winner in sheer volume of changes in a single day was Mitt Romney, whose main biographical page logged a wearying twenty-eight edits. Internet darling Ron Paul came in second with eighteen changes, while others registered few or no edits.

Many of the changes on any given day in Wikipedia are fairly mundane: typo fixing, formatting adjustments, shifts of information from one section of a page to another. Others are repairs of vandalism, the wildly outrageous statements that are the equivalent of scrawls across a campaign poster and are usually quickly deleted. (It’s a safe bet that “Ron Paul is the new spokesman for Fierce Melon Gatorade” is going to be noticed and taken out pretty quickly.)

From the Miami Herald:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is calling for ”unrestricted rights” for Cuban Americans to visit and send money to family in Cuba, just days before his first pilgrimage to Little Havana as a presidential candidate.

President Bush clamped down on family travel and remittances to Cuba in an effort to squeeze dictator Fidel Castro. The policy has become a flash point in the Cuban-American community, which traditionally leans toward the GOP.

”Cuban-American connections to family in Cuba are not only a basic right in humanitarian terms, but also our best tool for helping to foster the beginnings of grassroots democracy on the island,” Obama wrote in an opinion column published in today’s Miami Herald. “Accordingly, I will grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island.”

Obama is expected to repeat his message Saturday at Miami-Dade County Auditorium, a site laden with nostalgia for Cuban exiles. It was there that President Ronald Reagan declared “Cuba sí, Castro no” during a landmark, anti-communist speech in 1983 that emboldened a Cuban-American community then hovering on the political fringes.