Declared Dems Online and Swifties Fined

Before Washington Journal yesterday morn, I caught C-SPAN’s rerun of Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s presidential bid announcement. While taking questions from reporters, mostly about his stance on Iraq, Kucinich made an effort to tout his Web site and imply he’d have no trouble scoring campaign cash online and elsewhere.

Kucinich could use some SEO help, though (attention lefty search volunteers!). In search for his site (Hey, I was watching at 6:45 am for crissakes! I can’t remember the damn URL!), I stumbled across lots of result listing links to blog posts and media coverage of his announcement, and even ran by his ’04 campaign site before the new one. And yes, I was searching on “Dennis Kucinich 08.”

Well, he may not need SEO help once people begin linking to the pics and vids of him beside his attractive new (and taller) wife, Elizabeth, a redheaded Brit, no less.

Interestingly, the Kucinich campaign is using a .us domain extension (Kucinich.us). Kucinich.com leads to an up-to-date, irreverent site for tracking the Ohio Democrat’s whereabouts and such. DennisKucinich.com leads to an obsolete page promoting a never-happened Jerry Brown/Kucinich ticket in ’04. Evidently they were not interested in the more obvious .com domains (…forpresident.com, …08.com, etc).

Also on the declared Dems front, Iowa Guv and Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack has a bunch of new videos up on beta video sharing site/distribution service blip.tv. He’s also got vids up on his official ’04 campaign site, along with his MySpace page (looks legit), YouTube and iTunes.

I could spend all day searching names like Clinton, Guiliani, McCain, Richardson, Gingrich, Edwards (and on and on) on all the likely video/social networking sites, and I’m sure I’d find lots o’ stuff out there, from their related PACs, supporters and detractors. The next two years will most definitely be big years for political Web video and campaigning in general.

It will be interesting, however, to see how the FEC’s recent fining of The Swift Boat Vets, ($299,500), MoveOn ($150,000) and League of Conservation Voters ($180,000) plays out when it comes to online campaigning and donating during that time.