Bill Clinton v. Fox News.....Everyone's in IA, NH.... Leader Pence? ...Brunch special: On The Download: Do Podcasts Matter?
The Brunch is an exclusive Saturday political news digest and tip sheet from the editors of The Hotline.
WHAT'S BREWING
Polls aren't yet open in the Aloha state, but they will be by the time you take your late afternoon siesta. Here's our preview. Will the lion of Hawaii and his union/party establishment survive Ed Case's challenge?
Here's a transcript of Chris Wallace's interview with Bill Clinton. You'll be talking about it all weekend. All the buttons that could have been pushed, were. Excerpt: Clinton: "I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people."
In his radio address, Pres. Bush previews his meetings next week with Karzai .
Mark Hosenball's sources tell him how the detainee deal came about.
We know you want to know what's in the Nagourney profile of Ken Mehlman. Mehlman's three favorite presidents of the 20th century: FDR, Reagan and Johnson. Here's a key paragraph: "The relationship between Mehlman and Rove — two men of similar fascinations, skills and ideologies — has long been at once cooperative and competitive; Mehlman’s friends voice private frustration at just how much credit Rove drew for the campaign of 2004, though Mehlman is far too disciplined and corporate to concede any such resentment. But Rove’s star has dimmed because of the troubles of the second-term Bush White House and his own legal battles, and heading into the fall the two men appear to be equals in calling the shots on this midterm campaign. And it is Mehlman who is out front — along with the White House’s political director, Sara Taylor — immersed in dealing with candidates, contributors and consultants, riding campaign managers, overseeing the latest voter-turnout innovation, determining where money and resources will be spent. Mehlman is the public face of this campaign, giving speeches at events, appearing on television, talking to reporters; Rove has largely kept out of public view. And it is Mehlman, rather than Rove, who seems positioned to take much of the blame if November delivers the first big defeat of the Bush political machine since it took the White House six years ago."
An internal DNC strategy memo defends the party's GOTV effort: "While much has been made of the RNC’s “72-hour project,” its effectiveness may not be as strong this time around. First, Republicans will have a much harder time motivating their voters to turn out, as the recent polls cited above indicate a shrinking base of support for Republicans. Second, while Republicans are just getting started, the DNC’s efforts began months ago. RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman recently touted their 72-hour plan and their 1 million voter contacts. But, the DNC’s July 2006 organizing day already led to 2 million voter contacts. We will build upon this work by holding another national organizing day in October, prior to the election. We have been building a ground operation for over a year through the 50-state strategy and through the combined efforts of the committees and partners we will have what we need to compete this November. We also have an aggressive, national voter protection effort. Furthermore, the DNC’s organizing efforts and technological improvements over the past two years are formidable. The DNC has a state-of-the-art voter file that is being used in 45 states. We have had people on the ground for over a year organizing, engaging in voter contact activities (phone banks, canvassing, etc.) and employing aggressive communications strategies in all 50 states. Through the combined efforts of the committees and our partners, we will have an unprecedented voter turnout effort." (Hotline sources)
From the FRC's Washington Briefing: "Worried that discontent among conservatives and the lack of a clear standard-bearer to follow President Bush might cost Republicans in November," top evangelical leaders "pleaded with their followers Friday to put aside frustrations and turn out for GOP candidates." James Dobson: "There is no choice because the alternative is awful."
President Bush is scheduled to appear at a private fundraiser 9/28 in New Albany for Rep. Deborah Pryce, while former President Clinton is coming to OH on 10/23 for U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown and the Ohio Democratic Party. Bush also is scheduled to be in Cincinnati on 9/25 to raise money for Sen. Mike DeWine.
Sen. Joe Biden is in Iowa this weekend; he appears a Polk. Co. GOTV fundraiser in Des Moines tomorrow. Sen. Chris Dodd is in the following SC localities through 9/25: Anderson, Spartaburg Co., Greenville, Columbia, West Columbia, Sullivan's Island and Florence. Gov. Bill Frist spends the weekend in Iowa. Gov. Tom Vilsack spends it in New Hampshire, as does Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. Evan Bayh.
Gannett's Chuck Raasch wonders whether ex-VA Gov. Mark Warner will wind up being Gored for his love of the latest technological jangle. "Warner said Gore was hurt by the fallout of a bursting Internet bubble. "In a lot of ways, the late '90s and even through 2000, it was more the promise of what this transformative change was going to do to our lives. ...It didn't happen as quickly" as some were predicting, he said, but now, "how it is changing lives is much more real."
We can't find the link for this, but it appears as if those Fox News appearances are paying off for Mitt Romney. From the MIRS Capitol Capsule: "Fox News commentator Bill O'REILLY told a gathering here today that Massachusetts Gov. and former Michigander Mitt ROMNEY is his early favorite to win the 2008 presidential election over U.S. Sen. Hillary CLINTON (D-N.Y.) in what he sees now as the likely head-to-head race. Speaking at the Michigan Future Forum, sponsored by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, O'Reilly said former frontrunner U.S. Sen. John McCAIN (R-Ariz.) will be hurt for his "soft" positions on the terrorist interrogation and border security issues."
Mike Huckabee, a burglar, a staff member and a pardon
We're fairly certain that even the most jaded of TV bookers would agree with Markos Moutlisas's post on jaded TV bookers.
This week on Hotline TV, Chuck and John recap MA and WA primaries, investigate George Allen's past and future, prepare for Saturday's HI primaries and wonder if the Dems' magic number in the Senate is now 7. Visit HotlineTV.net for the latest predictions, to sign up for email alerts or to view our now daily webisodes, plus check in on Fridays for the full weekly show!
This Week has Frist and profiles the Menendez/Kean race. Meet has Ex-Pres. Clinton. So does Fox News Sunday! Face has McCain.
TN: The RNC's independent expenditure folks are out with a new ad in Tennessee that takes on Rep. Harold Ford for a variety of immigration and national security sins. Tagline: "No wonder Howard Ford has been rated the most liberal Congressman in Tennssee. With that kind of record, he has to be."
TN: Ford gets more free media on his church ad (which, wethinks would draw a bit more outrage from Barry Lynn were he an Christian conservative GOPer)
VA: For Republicans, a pessimisticWeekly Standard profile about the future of Geo. Allen. James Webb is campaigning in rural VA, an area that Allen knows well.
SC: Graham's not worried about a primary challenge in '08.
HOUSE RACES
AZ 08: All quiet in AZ 08. National Democrats, following the lead of their Republican counterparts, "yanked money" out of the Giffords vs. Graf race 9/22.
MN 06: The only "tension" in a MN 06 debate Friday night came when Republican state Sen. Michele Bachmann and DFLer Patty Wetterling "jousted over whether there should be a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage." Bachmann says yes, and Wetterling says no.
GOVERNORS RACES
CA: The LA Times reports that CA Dem Phil Angelides is "inspiring growing concern" among Dems and campaign allies that he'll lose to Arnold. Badly. His biggest problems appear to be lukewarm fundraising and tepid support among organized labor.
FL That deep-pocked Reform party candidate for GOV in FL calls Crist gay on radio show. Also: The money gap grows for Jim Davis. Check out the CoH.
SC: Two pro-flag, powerful GOP state Senators hit Sanford for doing the NAACP debate outside SC. Here we go, back to the flag debate. note, btw, that one of the two state sen's, Courson, is a recent, much-touted McCain sign-up.
MA: Healey up on air and uses a presser to go after Patrick on crime and kowtowing to teachers' unions. Still, also, trying to get mileage out of the Johnston remark.
CO: Is it us for has every candidate in the country run an ad where the candidate's opponent is caught on camera asking voters to hold him or her accountable?
CROSSING OUR TRANSOM
Associates and GOP staffers say that Rep. Mike Pence has designs on a senior leadership position in the House regardless of whether Republicans keep control of the House. Remember that he shrugged off pressure from House conservatives to run in November. It just wasn't his time. But now -- it might be. Another insurgent, Rep. John Shadegg, also publicly dipped his golden toe in the water two weeks ago by making sure that his fundraising efforts on behalf of Republican candidates were picked up by the publications that cover Capitol Hill.
Lots ado in Gov. George Pataki's presidential preparation drama. We hear that his 21st Century Freedom PAC has reserved office space in Manchester. We hear that Pataki is returning to Iowa to open an office there in Urbandale on 9/29. And that a team from Pataki's PAC is in SC today meeting with top SC leaders... and that the PAC expects to announce its team soon.
Welcome back to On The Download, your almost-daily dispatch on politechs: Politics, Multimedia and the Internet. Hotline subscribers: Check out our archives.
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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a politician releases a podcast and no one listens to it, does it make sense to keep recording them? Politicians do keep making them -- about one third of Senators record some form of podcast. And while it's difficult to find a consistent measure for comparison, most podcasts find subscriber numbers in the low hundreds. Political campaigns see even worse numbers, which leads OTD to ask, "Who's actually listening to political podcasts?"
"I have not come across a candidate podcast that has been like, 'Oh my gosh, did you hear that podcast?'" said former online communications director for Westly for Governor (CA) Joel Bush. He said the three podcasts they created were listened to only a couple hundred times, and chalked up poor numbers to not putting the spots on iTunes. By contrast, Westly's most popular video on the Web site got 6,000 views as a result of pumping it with robo-calls and putting it on YouTube. "It's not just people subscribing. It's that focus on communicating with people consistently that's important" he explained.
But according to Bush, at least someone was listening: The opposition. He said he knew Phil Angelides' camp was listening to the casts by from their IP address. "It's a common thing that's a lot of what of what's on your site is viewed quite heavily by the opposition," said Bush.
There's no consensus on a way to rate who has the most-listened-to podcasts, but there are typically two sets of numbers: Subscribers and downloads. Rob Walsh, a general podcasting expert who operates Podcast411 and does podcasting for John Edwards and Bill Richardson, said it's tough to get anyone to talk about their podcasting statistics. ""Nobody is making their stats public," he said. "Some of them are mis-interpreting their numbers or over-stating their numbers."
Walsh said podcasters can track their popularity in three ways. He hosts Edwards' podcasts for a small monthly fee with Libsyn.com, which gives the number of "unique downloads" and breaks it down by subscribers that allows for multiple IP addresses. Walsh said podcasts can also be tracked by Feedburner, which gives a subscriber count and offers a "pro" service that tracks downloads and unique downloads (similar to unique visitors on Web site in a 24-hour period. Finally, there are other third party services, such as Podtrac.com and ClickCaster, but Walsh's preference is for Libsyn. But even if you can track unique downloads and subscribers, there's no way to tell if the user actually played the podcast, or alternatively, how many people listened to the same download.
Here's another issue: Most podcasters use Feedburner to track their listeners instead, and oftentimes users confuse the total number of listeners with each time the feed hits up pings the source, which could be as much as once an hour, or 24 times their actual number of downloads.
And don't count on iTunes as your metric: Walsh says iTunes doesn't rank podcasts by most popular subscriptions, but rather the most popular in the last week, weighted to favor the last 24 hours. Until early summer 2006, iTunes ranked political podcasts in their own category as a top 100. But when iTunes re-organized their categories and put politicians' podcast into the "News and Politics" section, up against the likes of the New York Times and Real Time With Bill Maher, nearly all pol-related podcasts dropped off the top 100. Now the last one continuously in the top 100 (and top 40) is Barack Obama, whose podcasts iTunes pumps features on their front podcast page. For an undetermined reason, other politicians' podcasts were sidelined to the "Government and Organizations" section, where Pres. Bush's speeches are on top and Sen. Hillary Clinton not too far behind the podcaster-in-chief.
"When a candidate or a PAC or an organization says they have a number one podcast on iTunes, that does not mean they have the most popular podcast," according to John Edwards' One America Committee internet director Ryan Montoya. "iTunes ranks them on a 24-hour period. When we released the Jimmy Carter podcast, we were ranked number 86 of all podcasts. But that doesn't mean we're 86 all the time." Montoya said when they started the podcasts about 2 years ago in the pre-iTunes era, only a "few thousand people" subscribed. He maintains that top political podcasts only have about 3,000 listeners.
That number might surprise Senator Bill Frist, one of the most active politician-podcasters around. According to VOLPAC and and Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, when Frist recorded his first podcast on the Avian Flue last February for Reynolds' blog it was downloaded 1.2 million times. No one denies that Frist likes reaching out to the blogging community, but that number is by far the highest downloands OTD heard in our queries. According to internet director Stephen Smith, Frist's typical VOLPAC podcasts have "thousands" of subscribers, with his "best guess" between 4,000 and 7,000 downloading any given podcast.
"I can tell you right now they didn't get 1.2M subscribers" said Walsh. He said based on his conversation with Feedburner, which Reynolds also uses, no political podcast has more than 100,000 subscribers. One of the most popular podcasts on the web, according to Walsh, is "This Week In Tech" with Leo Laporte only gets 330,000 downloads. He said on average, all podcasts (political and otherwise) have 60 to 70 subscribers and only a "handful" have more than 100,000 subscribers.
One of the more hyped podcasts, the "JackCast" with Rep. Jack Kingston's (R-GA), only claims to have 300 subscribers. Former communications director David All said he got that number by looking at how many times the XML file was downloaded. All understands why podcasts like those by NRP or Slate have taken off, while politicians' casts have not. "I would probably be your guy whose mostly to subscribe and listen to podcasts and I don't," All said. [SHIRA TOEPLITZ]
1 Comments
The 1.2 million figure is the number of times the file was requested according to Analog, the off-the-shelf stats package we run on the podcasts.instapundit.com server. It is not the number of subscribers, but as far as I can tell it's the best measure of how often the file was downloaded. We have since moved our podcasts to the Pajamas Media servers, and they are working on a custom stats package that will provide more information, but the numbers provided by Analog seem to be accurate, and certainly are not generally inflated -- the "Porkbusters" podcast with House Majority Leader John Boehner, for example, got only about 8500 downloads, much to my disappointment.
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The 1.2 million figure is the number of times the file was requested according to Analog, the off-the-shelf stats package we run on the podcasts.instapundit.com server. It is not the number of subscribers, but as far as I can tell it's the best measure of how often the file was downloaded. We have since moved our podcasts to the Pajamas Media servers, and they are working on a custom stats package that will provide more information, but the numbers provided by Analog seem to be accurate, and certainly are not generally inflated -- the "Porkbusters" podcast with House Majority Leader John Boehner, for example, got only about 8500 downloads, much to my disappointment.