The sites touting 7th Congressional District representative Bob Beauprez and his opponent, Jeffco DA Dave Thomas, are considerably less interesting. The Beauprez offering, at www.beauprezforcongress.com, is fine visually but lacking in substance, whereas Thomas's counterpart, www.davethomasforcongress.com, is garish and ham-handed. The low point is a section dubbed "Bob Beauprez's Lies," which feels far more frantic and hysterical than Salazar's "Truth Watch." Its air of desperation doesn't reflect well on Thomas's chances.
The weakness of Thomas's online venture is surprising, given the enthusiasm for the medium expressed by his press secretary, Dayna Hanson. A recent CU-Boulder graduate, Hanson credits former presidential candidate Howard Dean with "changing everything with the way he used the Internet. He really grasped that grassroots approach to motivating people and making them feel that they have a voice. This election, we've really seen the power behind the blog."
John Johnston
Dean Singleton, seen in a 2001 photo, pushes for
Bush.
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So why doesn't Thomas's site include a blogging place? "It did, but we took it down," she concedes. "We had so much happening on our front page, and it wasn't being used that much."
As Hanson's admission suggests, the Internet revolution is not yet universal. Ed Graham, spokesman for congressional candidate Stan Matsunaka, Musgrave's Democratic opponent in the 4th Congressional District, sings the praises of the www.stan2004.com site and says that approximately 15 to 20 percent of the donations his campaign has received have come through this portal. Yet Dave Pearson, campaign manager for Representative Tom Tancredo, who's running for re-election in the 6th Congressional District against long shot Democrat Joanna Conti, thinks the web's influence has been overplayed, particularly on the local level.
"Websites are a reality these days, and you have to have one," he says. "But it isn't an exceptionally effective tool. After all, there's a finite number of people who'll take the time and energy to see what your positions are on your website, especially when you're talking about a congressional district. If it's a national candidate, you might get hundreds of thousands of hits, but on our level, the numbers are much more reduced." While that will probably change in the future, he believes, "I don't think it's quite here yet."
Given this philosophy, it's no wonder that Tancredo's campaign address, www.tancredo.org, is so undistinguished. Among the casually assembled jumble of facts collected there is a lengthy listing of events that, according to its intro, the candidate may not actually attend. Then again, the site bests the donations component of Musgrave's online headquarters in at least one respect: On top of Visa, MasterCard and Discover, Big Tom also accepts American Express.
Musgrave had better hope haters of the radical homosexual agenda left home without it.
