Judging a Candidate by Their Website

Today I ventured onto the McCain website to establish my insurgent profile. (You can see my own McCain profile - pixelmarx.johnmccain.com - but it’s very likely not going to get pass some approval stage.)

Anyway, someone had mentioned how McCain had hacked the Obama logo, along with his campaign slogan. There was also mentioned that he’d given his site a face lift, replacing the military recruiting brand (blacks and gold) with a patriotic blue theme.

So I went through the motions of setting up a profile, signing up for email so I could be kept current on all things McCain. I received an email to set up my password. I followed the link and typed in a password I use only for sites that I’m think will likely try to steal something of my identity.

And on the success of my venture, I landed on “Page Not Found”. (UPDATE: When I visited the site again, of course it recognized me.) By the way, does anyone want to participate in fund raising for McCain - a penny campaign, where everyone sends 100 pennies to his campaign? It might be kind fun (idea stolen from middle school kids).

And again, I need to get back to my original point. This experience made me think, how does the candidate’s website influence their success in the election? Of the three candidates Obama had the best site for social media and grassroots organizing. Hillary’s wasn’t bad, but my experience there that it bordered on tight control, without the ability to create my own dashboard, track my posts, my donations, points and events happening near me. And McCains’..well I never tried to interact with the McCain 2.0 web site. It was too much like the Army “Be All You Can Be” and I’m not all that. Perhaps McCain felt black and gold colors signified belief in America…old fascist America. The new site offered a little bit of Hope. At least he knew a good site to copy when he saw one.

But it failed me at the moment when it should have thanked me. Instead I got the dreaded 404 error, “Page Not Found”. And I’m left wondering if a McCain in office would be a “President Not Found” a 4.04 Trillion dollar error as we sat in a quagmire of Iraq, draining $10/gallon gas through our unabated CO2.