If I ever decide to run for president myself, I will be sorely tempted to run an Internet-only campaign. It's not so ridiculous anymore: pop a few videos up on YouTube, open a MySpace account, start a campaign blog and website...who says campaigning has to be unpleasant or that you need to leave your house to do it? It would be the Rocking Chair Campaign 2.0; William McKinley would be proud, God rest his soul. Even I wouldn't vote for me.
The serious presidential candidates aren't campaigning from rocking chairs in 2007, especially not Sam Brownback. The senator from Kansas has embarked on a grueling four-day, 27-stop tour across the state of Iowa next week as he strives to build support before the August Iowa straw poll. I honestly cannot imagine visiting 27 different towns and presumably doing something in each one to help one's campaign over the course of just four days. Brownback isn't supposed to simply show up, either; he is supposed to also appear appealing to the voters who will be meeting him all day long. I'm not sure how much I'll be writing about Brownback in the future because up to this point I haven't found his campaign to be among the most exciting or interesting, but I have to give the man some credit here. He's putting in the miles, the hours, and the elbow grease in Iowa in order to compete in a straw poll other GOP candidates have deemed to be not worth competing in. I suspect some of the small towns Brownback will be visiting next week won't be visited at all by the top candidates. Of course, Brownback is from a midwestern state himself and probably considers Iowa a state he could win next year; his frenetic campaigning there doesn't mean he would exert the same energy to campaign across small-town Massachusetts, for instance. Nonetheless, if I were from a small town in Iowa I'd appreciate the effort Brownback is making to reach out to me.
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