News Article #4 Chris Woolley

Internet plays increasingly important role in American election

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ET_Cetera/Internet_plays_a_major_role_in_US_election/articleshow/3631387.cms

For the first time ever a very large amount of money has been collected using the internet for the campaign of a presidential candidate. Barack Obama has collected almost $150 million in the month of September using his internet site. This is a very large amount of money and most of this money has been given in small amounts by a lot of different donors. This will be the first election where this kind of money has been donated via the internet. Obama has already collected about three times the amount of money John Kerry collected for the last Presidential election. Obama has used the internet through his website and other online ads to try to gain votes form the youth of America. He has enlisted the creator of Facebook to help him advertise on the internets largest social networking site. Obama thinks that all the internet ads and money will be the edge for him to win the election. Obama’s opponent in the upcoming election is John McCain. McCain has only used the internet sparingly in his campaign and focused on more traditional medians for advertising. I think that this could provide Obama with a good amount of votes in the election because kids and other young adults use the internet all the time and are more likely to get their news from it than other sources. The only problem with this plan is that kids usually don’t vote so even if Obama gets the kids on his side he will have to get them to come out and vote to get any benefit from all this advertising.