Last week, a glowing John McCain appeared at the California Republican Party spring convention in San Jose. He had reason to glow, having just sucked in more than $2 million off his Web site.
But despite the event's locale, near the heart of Silicon Valley, and the hoopla surrounding his overflowing Web coffers, McCain barely made mention of the technology that made it all possible ... until after his keynote address, when pressed by reporters to do so.
"The Internet is going to change the face of politics," he said. "It's really turned into an important part of the campaign."
A recent Forrester Research study likened the McCain' Net-contribution hysteria to the 1960 televised Kennedy-Nixon debates, a moment in history when technology fundamentally changed the way politics was done.
"The Internet becomes a re-enfranchisement vehicle," the Forrester report says. "Ease of giving reconnects citizens with the political process and lets "me generation" voters participate without getting their hands dirty by knocking on neighbors' doors."
The study tells us what we already know -- that the Net will offer less financially endowed candidates a chance to compete with established politicians through increased media exposure and a direct line of communication to potential donors. In other words, "it lowers the cost of raising money."
McCain's success is also a prelude to widespread online voting, the report said, which will bring with it new "debates over privacy, security and authentication."
Boxers or briefs?: In a world where presidential candidates are expected to reveal their preferences for anything, even the two mainstays of men's underwear, Vice President Al Gore was taken by surprise when a college student asked him to reveal his partiality for the computer world's two major operating systems.
At a town-hall forum in Ybor City, Florida, Gore was asked whether he preferred the PC platform or Macintosh by a 19-year-old college student, according to an article in the Nando Times.
"That's kind of a high-tech, boxers-or-briefs question, there," Gore said carefully, as he no doubt weighed the political value of his answer.
Gore answered the student by straddling both sides of the technological fence. He said he used Apple until "finally the delay in the availability of the new high-tech applications software got to be so long that I finally switched over."
The student, an avid Apple user, later told a reporter that he hoped to convert Gore to Macintosh.
The pious electorate: Who knew the Almighty played such a major role in the lives of Net-savvy women? According to a poll conducted by iVillage and InterSurvey, a Web polling organization religion counts in a big way when women are deciding whom to vote for.
In a random sampling of 661 women, more than three-quarters expressed that it was important that a candidate believe in God, and more than two-thirds favored a reintroduction of prayer in schools. Moreover, 83 percent said religion was important in their lives.
The poll also found that women who consider themselves to be feminists supported Al Gore, while religious conservatives dug George W. Bush.
Stop the presses.
