Like me, you may have thought that Hillary Clinton's refusal to recant her Iraq war vote, while refreshingly honest, was the major reason for her failure in the primaries. How wrong we were:
Google political ad man Peter Greenberger thinks Hillary Clinton's campaign was hampered by its failure to use search advertising consistently throughout the primary season. While he acknowledges the New York Senator's campaign deserves credit for experimenting with new media tools, he argues savvy search advertising contributed to the success of both Barack Obama's and John McCain's primary season wins by helping them build supporter lists. Through sponsored links in search results, the McCain and Obama camps have driven users seeking information on the candidates to their official Web sites to register for newsletters, volunteer or to donate money.
I wouldn't have thought that people who couldn't work out that Hillary Clinton's web site was hillaryclinton.com, even if they might have considered her the "bee's knees," would have gotten much help from Google (or The Google, as they'd likely call it). And it seems to me that finding your way to Hillary's campaign (in one medium or another) over the past few months would have been about as hard as finding heat on the surface of the sun—even without a computer. But hey, I could be wrong.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a spokesman out there for the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters saying that her problem was, you know, not enough speeches about plumbing.
I thought her problem was all that maniacally gleeful pointing she did at somebody or other in the crowd just before she was getting ready to speak.
(Sometimes I fancied it was always the same person, an amiable stalker, as in, "look, it's Greg!" or something like that.)
Posted by: Jonathan versen | Monday, June 16, 2008 at 01:32 PM