Google CEO: Internet Key to 2008 Presidential Campaign

The winner of the 2008 presidential election will be the candidate who uses the internet the best according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

After listing several examples of politicians who were victims of highly effective internet campaigns, Schmidt elaborated on why the web is important:

"This is going to happen over and over again as people use these new media to communicate," Schmidt said at a speech to the Republican Governors Association in Miami. "The ones that take advantage of this most effectively will be the ones that will be the winners of the next election.

Schmidt also said that his company was establishing procedures to stop web spamming (aka "Google bombing") that many left-wing blogs engaged in during the 2006 elections by repeatedly linking to negative articles about Republicans in order to bump them upward in search results. Unsavory business types also love to engage in this, in many cases setting up "spam blogs" designed to promote their products and web sites to unsuspecting web readers.

Eric Schmidt's remarks are doubly interesting considering how much negative publicity his company has received for being unfair to conservatives. It's possible things may be changing on that account. We'll have to see. He's certainly correct in his analysis in any case.

I'd also add that Republicans are a good deal behind Democrats on this account.