What will page views, YouTube clips, and MySpace friends add up to for Web-savvy Democratic hopefuls?
By Robert Bryce Joe Biden doesn’t have a prayer. And, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with his idiotic remarks about Barack Obama’s personal hygiene. Instead, the odds on Biden’s bid for the White House in 2008 are readily available to any Web surfer who spends a few minutes at MySpace.com. In late February, the Biden for president page on MySpace showed that the Democratic senator from Delaware had a grand total of 332 “friends.” Biden’s fellow Democrat in the Senate, the “clean” one from Illinois, had 45,043. To make Biden feel just a bit worse, yet another Senate Democrat running for president, Hillary Clinton, had 23,798 friends on her MySpace page. Tom Vilsack, who dropped out of the race and of SXSW Interactive soon after being interviewed for this piece, had nearly 1,400. Even Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York who hasn’t formally declared his candidacy, had 665 friends. These friends don’t necessarily translate into votes, but the MySpace numbers are part
