Opinion: The Ticket’s weekend web wanderings

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Some weekend web findings:

This is one of our favorite websites of all time, besides Top of the Ticket, of course. It’s a wonderful video museum of television commercials from presidential campaigns as far back as 1952, which is even before Lindsay Lohan was born.

Back then, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the wartime hero and university president, took on Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois for the first of two drubbings the general would administer to the gracious and eloquent Democratic governor.

Hint: If you watch the ads in sequence election by election, you may notice life is getting rougher in the political arena. You can even get a rare glimpse of two notorious campaign ads: Lyndon Johnson’s little girl daisy ad from 1964 that implied Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war and George H.W.Bush’s Willie Horton ad from 1988, an ad which, by the way, was broadcast only one time. But that was enough.

Students of politics have noticed how much Sen. Barack Obama has improved his debating skills in recent months. No longer, for instance, does he....

hesitate to turn toward his opponent and speak to her directly. But he still makes rookie mistakes. Remember the recent Democratic debate that got so heated between the Illinois freshman and what’s-her-name from New York?

Read the revealing three-part transcript carefully and you can see how skillfully Hillary Clinton deflects or dodges attacks or charges into another area that allows pursuit of her own message. Then notice how earnestly Obama seeks to answer every charge, which not only prolongs the time devoted to negative things about him, but eats up precious time he needs to devote to his own message. Touchdown: Clinton.

Speaking of the Clintons, our friends over at the Smoking Gun have uncovered some fun staff memos from the Goldeneye Resort in Jamaica where the former and possibly future first couple spent a long Easter weekend a while back. We learn, for instance, that they both like red and white wines and fish and spicey foods and privacy but NOT shellfish. And they’re not big on chocolate desserts.

There goes the coveted chocoholic vote.

Anyone interested in blackmailing David Gergen, who has sold his communications expertise to every president of every party since the early 1900s or something like that? Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine has posted an entertaining video of Gergen trying to dance.

In preparation for tomorrow night’s State of the Union Address, likely the last by President Bush, Jon Ward of the Washington Times has written a very useful review of all Bush’s previous SOTU speeches in digest form.

One of the world’s funnier bloggers, Howard Mortman of Extreme Mortman, has a mocking commentary on Sen. Clinton’s proposal to establish a whole series of government blogs to open up government. As a true contrarian blogger, he raises the question whether government employees can honestly blog about their own agency? Oh, and then he points out, that anyway the Bush administration already has government blogs.

The folks over at Zap2It have an interesting game set up, figuring out which actor/actress could best play which presidential candidate.

Feel the need to check on Rep. Ron Paul’s impressive fundraising that’s still outpacing his better-known Republican competitors? Watch the spinning fundraising dial here and witness the crossing off of photos of all the GOP candidates who are now former candidates while Paul and his legions of no-name supporters keep chugging along under the radar of most media.

Or if you just want to annoy the PETA-types, shoot some kittens.

--Andrew Malcolm