THE US REPORT

If the US presidential candidates took off on a foot race across the Web, the Democratic Party would win hands down. The latest Snopes.com analysis of issues about Barack Obama set me to thinking. Snopes analyzed an editorial about Obama; the article originally appeared in the NY Sun. It seemed to me there’d been a lot of Obama analyses lately, so I took a look. I input each presidential candidate’s name into the search engine at the Snopes site. Results: Obama—16; McCain—2. The analysis of McCain actually included an analysis of his wife. In response to an email listing good things Mrs. McCain has done,  Snopes felt obligated to throw in a few of Mrs. McCain’s negative behaviors as well. I did a search on the Clintons too. There were 26 stories related to that famous couple. For those not familiar with Snopes, a site description via a search says Snopes is the “definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation.”  For a real tummy tickler, I noted the third result. If you put ‘What is Snopes.com’ into the Google search engine, the third result is ‘Who is Barack Obama.’ Web irony at its height.

I ventured further out on the Worldwide Web, using Google for my search. I simply input each candidate’s last name. Results: Clinton—36,000,000; McCain—22,200,000; Obama—31,300,000. Adding insult to injury, a search for ‘Liberal’ drew 2,410,00 results; a search for ‘Conservative’ drew 1,170,000.

I couldn’t resist the Associated Press, since that service fills pages for most of our daily newspapers and their Web sites. Here are the results based on returns at the AP website: Barack Obama—138; Hillary Clinton—105; John McCain—93.

The greatest discrepancy came in a web-wide search for supporters. For ‘Democrat supporters’ there were 2,640,000 results. For ‘Republican supporters’ there were 602,000 results.

Remember November when CNN got caught slipping a Clinton steering committee member (and other left leaners as well) into the GOP YouTube debate questions and media fallout ensued? Remember the comments of late about the GOP needing to rebrand? I think that’s pretty good advice,  but I'd like to go one further. The GOP needs to go actually go back to its brand, the one that stayed out of my bedroom and my bank account and held spending in check. I think branding tweaks might need to start right here on the Internet. Maybe then the GOP will catch up in the presidential footrace on the Worldwide Web.

(Filed by Kay B.Day. Figures cited above are based on simple searches conducted May 19. The figures are not part of an official study and they are in no way scientific, aspects favoring their authenticity.)