politics

WordPress and Politics Plus DNC 2012 Pix

For this election cycle, both the DNC and RNC powered their sites with WordPress, and a good many candidates this year at all levels did as well. It’s a huge signal that among those building sites in politics who want to take advantage of great CMS capabilities, top notch social integration, and out-of-the-box search friendly content — that the natural choice is now WordPress..

For a bit more context, WordPress powered 40% of the sites involved with the US Senate races, 35% of Congressional races, and over 41% of Gubernatorial races. We just put together a great infographic, WordPress Powers Politics, that is worth checking out with more of these stats.

In terms of events, our WordPress.com VIP team was in Charlotte earlier this month at the Democratic National Convention. I was able to swing by for a couple of days of meetings and to get an overall sense on how our government is using WordPress.

This DNC was my first one, and I had also been to the RNC when it was held in NY in 2004 when I was working at TIME.

Here are a few pics that I took:

Video: Each of us, All of us – Cory Booker at Zeitgeist Americas 2011

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, discusses the lessons he learned from his father’s experience as someone who grew up poor and was helped by a “conspiracy of love” around him, and how he believes that the solutions are out there with regard to solving major problems in criminal justice and education.

From Google Zeitgeist today, really impressive:

Tom Brokaw: “I knew I had been in the presence of greatness”

Brokaw reflects on covering RFK, who was assassinated 40 years ago today:

But as he [RFK] campaigned across the country, shirt-sleeves rolled up, hair tussled, accompanied by famous black athletes and little known Mexican-American farm workers as well as the glittering friends of the family dynasty, Bobby transformed his image. He was compassionate as well as tough, self-deprecating and fun-loving. He never failed to join in the sing-along on his campaign plane and he was brutally honest with college students hiding behind deferments to avoid service in Vietnam.

[ Read the full story on msnbc.com ]

NYT Magazine: The Aria of Chris Matthews

The cover story this past weekend in the NYT Magazine was a profile piece on Chris Mathews – host of Hardball on MSNBC and The Chris Matthews Show on NBC Sunday mornings ( with a smart segment called “tell me something I don’t know” ).

The cover story is a good read, and reveals a few things I didn’t know – but also focuses on the tensions between the various news anchors at MSNBC and Matthews’ off-the-cuff remarks that tend to get him in trouble with certain groups.

What I found interesting was that the piece was trying to make Matthews’ passion and ‘loudness’ into a generational thing — where younger people are more in tune with Colbert and Jon Stewart:

Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.

For me, I’m able to consume both types of formats, and find myself DVR’ing Hardball and skimming around for the good stuff and then watching certain Daily Show clips online.

It’s also refreshing to have someone like Chris who has a background of having worked on Capital Hill and in the White House and can filter out the noise.

Read the full story online.