Republicans Admit Obama is Winning the Online Battle

Barack Obama's campaign's superiority in its use of the internet as a political tool in the US presidential race was underlined in by a new media conference in New York yesterday, where senior Republican advisers admitted their party had become complacent in the past four years and lost the initiative.

Mindy Finn, who led internet strategy for Mitt Romney during the primaries, said the Republicans had lost their edge.

"The right was very big on the web in 2000, 2002 and 2004, and Bush was effective at getting his message out through videos and the blogosphere," said Finn. "But now we've got complacent."

The conference, organized by the Personal Democracy Forum, brought together a panel of chief internet strategists from several 2008 presidential campaigns - including that of Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain as well as Romney.

The vast gulf in internet-driven campaign energy between Obama and his Republican opponent McCain was underlined by the fact that Obama has just past the magical figure of one million supporters on the network site Facebook. McCain by contrast has about 150,000.

McCain's internet strategist, Mark Soohoo, insisted that this was not a measure of Obama's political support. "Just because we don't have a million Facebook friends doesn't mean we don't have supporters - if it did, the polls would be showing an Obama lead by nine to one."

Tracy Russo, part of Edwards's web team, said that McCain's grasp of social networking tools was "like trying to teach your grandmother about Twitter and then applying it to government". Soohoo countered that it was a mistake to assume McCain had no knowledge of new media. "You don't have to use a computer to know how it shapes the country," he said. "John McCain is aware of the internet. This is a man who has a long history of understanding a range of issues."

The one area of agreement between all panel members was that Obama's campaign had led the field in applying internet social networking tools to a presidential run, with massive results. His success in primaries and caucuses across the country, as well as in raising unprecedented amounts of money through small donations, can be traced back to the internet.

The Democratic candidate's top web strategist said the inspiration all flowed directly from the candidate himself. "[Obama's] been the driving force of the ethos and the use of the web," said Joe Rospars. "It has all flowed from his background as a community organizer and his knowledge of working on the ground."

Rospars denied Obama had been more stand-offish to bloggers than other candidates, saying the campaign's approach of spreading itself locally in all 50 states was intimately tied into the "blogosphere". He added that, if Obama reached the White House, he would introduce open communications into government, with meetings streamed live on the web.

Peter Daou, Clinton's internet chief, said 2008 was the first presidential election where the internet "really did arrive". Though he said it would be too complicated to merge Clinton's enormous database of supporters' emails with Obama's, everything would be done to use the collated information in the coming election to persuade her supporters to back him.