Several factors converged today to inspire this post. First I owe Dan a blog post on politics, as per a settlement we reached earlier this week. More importantly, I was watching the news last night and two unrelated stories caught my attention. The first was the results from the New Hampshire primaries where Hillary made a “comeback” win.

What’s really interesting about the news yesterday is not the result, but rather the positioning. (Comeback from where? Wasn’t she supposed to win all along?) After a big win in Iowa, all the momentum seems to be in Obama’s direction, with most analysts “surprised” to see a Clinton win. Hmm… Could it be that my previous post about the campaign 2.0 bubble was <gasp> off the mark? Are Barack’s Web 2.0 efforts paying off? It’s still early days, but the results of the Presidential primaries are a great test case for the legitimacy of these new Web tools for political communication. With Barack clearly generating more popularity among young voters (see charts below), the primaries also provide an interesting venue for gauging the influence of Net Gen voters.

The second interesting piece of news from last night was this story about Alberta’s Premier Ed Stelmach suing University of Alberta student and political blogger Dave Cournoyer over the use of the domain name “edstelmach.ca.” More than anything, I think this is a bit embarrassing for Premier Stelmach. As a public figure, one of the most basic rules of the Web game is registering your domain name. This is really Politics 0.0 – one step before even having a Web site.

Going back to the U.S. Presidential race, I was surprised to find that, although all candidates have Web sites, several do not own their domain names. Shocking! The leading Republican candidate in the December polls, Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t own his .com domain name, neither does Fred Thompson or the Republican Web 2.0 poster boy Ron Paul. The Democrats fare slightly better, but if someone wants to make a quick buck, mikegravel.com is still up for grabs.