Clever move by McCain Campaign; Tracking Changes

[CaptainChewbacca]

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McCain Campaign Uses Online Spider To Ambush Obama
By Sarah Lai Stirland July 15, 2008 | 8:45:38 PMCategories: Election '08

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign web site to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.
John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon.
"I'm an avid reader of blogs, so I thought this would be a good tool for campaigns and activists," he says. "This could be a good tool in their arsenal. "

Bray says that he got the idea from Wikipedia, which shows people the changes made to its entries. Versionista is a subscription service and allows people to track minute, detailed changes on web sites.

Back in November, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was launching "Flipper TV," an online and off-line effort that pools hours and hours of raw campaign trail footage filmed by individuals armed with digital cameras. The trackers attend Republican events in order to catch candidates making a statement that might contradict another on the same subject to a different audience.

Some Democratic activists, such as former Maria Cantwell, D-Wa. senate staffer Jed Lewison of "The Jed Report," have used that footage to great effect. Lewison created mash-ups to illustrate how McCain praised an electioneering group of the kind that he in theory disapproves of.

For its part, the McCain campaign on Tuesday used the online Versionista service to illustrate the Obama campaign's edits of its Iraq policy page in an attempt to illustrate the Democrat's shifting policy stance.

At first glance, the page is a sea of pink and green. Pink shows deleted words. Green shows where words were added.

It's not until halfway down the page that readers see that the Obama campaign changed its wording to change the spin about President Bush's policy of sending additional troops to Iraq to quell the violence.

The Friday, July 11 version of the page says: "at great cost our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006."

The Monday, July 14 version spidered by Versionista says: "Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military'™s hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families."

In time-honored political tradition, Obama also revised that section of the site to use another statistic selectively to make his point. The section was changed to say that since the surge began, more than a thousand American troops have died.

But military statistics released last week show that violence in the form of attacks, and the number of US casualties in Iraq, are now at a four year low. The attacks and casualties have plummeted from a peak in June 2007, according to those statistics.

McCain has long pushed for the idea of an increase in troop levels in Iraq to stem the violence. Both he and the Republican National Committee have been using the latest information to show Obama and his national security and Iraq war policy in an unflattering light.

For their part, conservative bloggers jumped on a Tuesday New York Daily News story that claimed that Obama's campaign had "scrubbed" its site of a sentence that said that the surge wasn't working.

But the side-by-side comparison published on McCain's page on Tuesday shows a more complex picture.

If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician.

I admit, I didn't expect the McCain campaign to do anything as tech-savvy as this. I expect it will become standard in future campaigns.

[Qwerty 42]

Yup. In a political universe where "flip-flopping" is a cardinal sin, this is a clever move by McCain. Credit where credit is due, so on.

[Rye]

Those changes seem pretty trivial to me, and I'd expect general updates and clarification as people spot sentences that could be misread or are slightly out of line with what he's actually saying. The hypocrisy that would be involved with McCain actually complaining about someone else flip-flopping would be too much.