Thursday, July 24, 2008 - Posts
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As we mentioned yesterday, thousands of people every month are visiting Obama.com expecting to find Barack Obama's campaign website. Instead, they find a Japanese site full of links for loans and hair transplants.
Thanks to the Web analytics firm Compete, we can begin to get an idea of how many eyeballs this is costing the Obama campaign. Compete provided Slate with "downstream" data--where people went after visiting Obama.com--for the 100,000-plus people who visited the site in June of the year:
- 21 percent went directly BarackObama.com.
- 40 percent went to a search engine.
- 17 percent tried another incorrect URL for Obama's site.
- 22 percent gave up and went elsewhere.
Of those 17 percent who took a second guess and failed, barakobama.com and barrackobama.com were the biggest attractions, both of which redirect to a Google search for the correct spelling of Obama's name. Obama.org and Obamma.com also show up.
As Slate's Paul Boutin has written before, Web analytics data is fungible. (Just ask Google.) But we can safely assume from these numbers that a failure to proactively register a wide variety of misspellings and alternate URLs is costing the campaign tens of thousands of page views a month. I presume that neither campaign needs my advice that every page view counts.
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John McCain’s tax policy has come under fire in the past, particularly for its dependence on huge revenue windfalls to balance the budget. But now a new study from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (a joint venture between Brookings and the Urban Institute) suggests there’s another flaw: a rhetoric gap.
According to the study, the tax plan McCain’s campaign laid out privately is different from the one he’s selling on the stump. If you include the policies he has advocated publicly—such as repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, increasing the dependent exemption to $7,000 right away, and reducing the corporate tax rate to 25 percent immediately—then the deficit after 10 years would actually be $2.8 trillion greater than if you go by his private plan. There’s also a rhetorical gap for Obama, but in his case the public version generates more revenue than the private one, thanks to a suggested hike in payroll taxes for people who make $250,000 or more. (Read the full study here [PDF].)
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official. For example, the study compares McCain’s promises on the stump to reduce the corporate tax rate immediately to his plan’s more gradual reduction. Holtz-Eakin objects: “You don’t say, I’d like to reduce it to 28 percent, then 26 percent, then 25 percent, then—no one talks like that on the stump. [You say,] I’d like to get it down to 25 percent.”
In other cases, Holtz-Eakin says, the TPC filled in gaps where the McCain campaign didn’t provide specifics. For example, McCain’s proposed Alternative Simplified Tax, a plan that would let taxpayers opt out of the current system in favor of a simpler two-rate system: “We were honest about the fact that we don’t have a specific proposal,” he said. “They didn’t have one, so they made one up.”
The Tax Policy Center sent the campaign a copy of the study a day before they released it. “Had I read more carefully, I probably would have raised [objections],” Holtz-Eakin said. “But I didn’t.”
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Is Barack Obama a secret Jew?
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From the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger:
PARCHMAN—Before he died Wednesday evening, death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop apologized to his victim's family, thanked America and urged people to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
"For those who oppose the death penalty and want to see it end, our best bet is to vote for Barack Obama because his supporters have been working behind the scenes to end this practice," Bishop said. …
Will Obama reject and denounce?
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