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Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, with his wife Cindy, thanks supporters in a victory speech Tuesday evening.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com )

NASHUA, N.H.--Hillary Clinton and John McCain won Tuesday's New Hampshire primaries the old-fashioned way: trekking to scores of coffee houses, diners, and high school gymnasiums. They shook hands, answered questions, and eventually convinced a plurality of voters.

This was politicking at its most traditional, employing venerable tactics like McCain's Straight Talk Express bus tour and Clinton's "Time to Pick a President" meetings with voters. By the time the polls closed, it was a rare Granite State resident who managed to avoid in-person contact with a would-be president or a pushy surrogate.

In other words, it was anything but high-tech. Sure, there were robo-calls and e-mail alerts, but, for the most part, the local events that convinced voters to pick Clinton and McCain could have been convened at any point in the last century.

One example: the day after losing in the Iowa caucuses, Clinton asked supporters to meet her at a hangar at the airport here in the frosty pre-dawn gloom. It was a miserable day not only for campaign aides but also for locals, with temperatures at the event hovering around minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit. The Democratic senator showed up, responded to questions, and departed in a coach emblazoned with "BIG CHALLENGES, REAL SOLUTIONS, TIME TO PICK A PRESIDENT" in bold letters.

Supporters of Hillary Clinton prepare for her victory speech that took place later this evening in a gymnasium in Manchester, N.H.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com)

Another example: employees of defense contractor BAE Systems crowded into a small auditorium to hear McCain speak, and, when that filled up, crowded into the main lobby to watch his remarks on a screen. The Republican senator spoke for half an hour, and, when the event was over, the workers waited patiently for the chance to shake McCain's hand or glimpse his campaign bus on the way out.

New Hampshire residents love it. More precisely, they claim to be annoyed by candidates and journalists interrupting their meals at diners and parking on their lawns when nearby events fill up, but they savor their chance to influence a presidential election and they take this role seriously.

Not only did Clinton's and McCain's tiresome, repetitive, voice-hoarsening efforts work, they nicely put into perspective the clamor that has arisen over social networks and other Internet popularity contests.

Neither of those candidates was a favorite online. Barack Obama, who came in second in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, has 219,707 MySpace "friends" to Clinton's 160,414. Obama and John Edwards each had more viewers on YouTube than Clinton did. Obama had around four times the number of "Eventful" demands for a visit than Clinton did and more than three times the Facebook friends.

And by any Internet metric, Texas Rep. Ron Paul should have captured the lion's share of the GOP vote in New Hampshire. He's arguably the Internet's favorite candidate, with Google engineers campaigning for him here, a remarkable lead on Eventful and Facebook, and 111,757 MySpace "friends" to McCain's mere 40,770.

Instead, Paul received just 8 percent of the vote (which is somewhat surprising after a weekend poll put him at 14 percent).

The reason for this, of course, is that Paul and Obama supporters tend to be young and tech savvy, which gives them disproportionate representation online. They flood online polls. They feverishly add their preferred candidate to their social networks. They organize, and raise funds, incredibly well.

John Edwards may not be the Internet's favorite candidate, but a campaign event in Portsmouth, N.H. proves he's adept at kissing babies.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com )

There's nothing wrong with that. But in presidential elections, votes matter, and those in Iowa and New Hampshire matter the most. Exercises in online nose-counting like press releases heralding the so-called "MySpace primary" don't.

To be sure, online politicking has been part of the 2008 election. The YouTube debates proved to be a provocative exercise in user-generated content, Meetup and MoveOn changed the way activism works, and e-mail lets campaigns stay in touch with voters and volunteers. As Paul devotees know, online fundraising is a powerful tool.

Journalists love these metrics (see above for the obligatory MySpace statistics) because they're easy to measure and report. But Tuesday's results should be a cautionary tale: votes matter. In-person meetings matter. Handshakes matter. MySpace friends don't.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)

MANCHESTER, N.H.--Not content to host a pair of YouTube presidential debates with CNN, Google and YouTube are now aggressively schmoozing the political press corps in New Hampshire.

Shmooze Exhibit A was last night's primary-eve election party here that Google held on the third and fourth floors of a converted mill building that now houses this former industrial city's SEE Science Center. Its motto: "Getting kids from toddlers to teens excited about science since 1986."

An electric 'candle' at the Google-YouTube press party in Manchester, N.H.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com )

In theory it was open only to press, but we noticed a few interlopers, including a Facebook Washington representative, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland, and, surrounded by eager conversation partners, Obama Girl in a filmy dress that left little to the imagination and was hardly suitable for New Hampshire in January. (There was, alas, no sign of Giuliani Girl or Ron Paul Girl.)

As an accent to the open bar, our hosts provided glowing Google-logo'd plastic ice cubes for mixed drinks, illuminated swizzle sticks, and electric "candles." A projector beamed the inevitable YouTube political videos onto a nearby screen. Other highlights of the science center location: the quirky exhibits, including one devoted to ice hockey (it is New England) and another of Lego blocks that reproduced the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in its entirety. The Amoskeag buildings once housed the largest cotton textile plant in the world; now, in renovated form, they house Autodesk, Texas Instruments, and the museum itself.

Sen. Barack Obama slams President Bush's warrantless wiretap program at Dartmouth College in his last public appearance before the polls close here in New Hampshire.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com )

HANOVER, N.H.--Barack Obama may be leading the Democratic presidential pack in every major poll here, but that didn't dissuade the Illinois senator from a final early-morning rally with the Facebook generation.

Clearly not content to leave their votes to the whims of online politicking, the Illinois senator stepped onto a stage fashioned in a Dartmouth College gymnasium, pulled an index card from his inside jacket pocket, and launched into a familiar set of talking points centered on what has become a familiar theme for his campaign: change and hope.

"My job this morning is to be so persuasive...that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack," he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers--and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event.

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It's hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.

In our own Technology Voters' Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: "No."

(Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Republican Ron Paul, for their part, came to the same conclusion in our survey.)

Barack Obama's audience at Dartmouth College was receptive but, compared to other political events in the state in the last week, relatively small.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com )

At the event, which was interrupted for about 10 minutes when a woman in the audience felt faint and was carried out on a stretcher, Obama also spent a few moments on another cause that's important to most of his competitors, regardless of party affiliation: the need to "break from the tyranny of fossil fuels" and the "addiction to foreign oil" in favor of a "green economy" built on alternative sources like solar, wind and biodiesel.

"We are going to save this planet, and you are going to help us do it because you are going to be voting today," he predicted.

Already 5 to 13 points ahead in the polls, depending on which ones you consult, Obama may not have needed to air the tried-and-true speech yet again. And thanks to springlike temperatures--a stark contrast from last week's subzero blitz--New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner reportedly predicted a record turnout of half a million voters before the polls close at 7 p.m. (and a few at 8 p.m.) EST Tuesday.

NASHUA, N.H.--New Hampshire residents are famously described as "gritty," "flinty," and, in a nod to last week's sub-zero temperatures here, "hardy."

Voters here are famously not described as tech-savvy. To be precise, they are famously not described as especially concerned with topics like Net neutrality and intellectual property rights that you, our dear readers, are.

At least that was our suspicion. In the last few days before Tuesday's primary, we set out to test that hypothesis by stopping New Hampshire-inians on the street and asking them questions about technology laws and regulation.

Mark Cancelada of Portsmouth, N.H.: John Edwards supporter who now has an e-mail address

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com)

We weren't disappointed. Nor, we're happy to report, did we get punched in the face for bothering those gritty, flinty, and hardy residents with questions about Net neutrality. What we did learn is that Granite State voters are not exactly preoccupied with political skirmishes over rewriting patent law, increasing H-1B visas, and, of course, the throughly pressing concern of broadband regulation.

"That means nothing to me," Mark Cancelada, 42, of Portsmouth, N.H., said when asked about Net neutrality, shortly after an early-morning John Edwards rally ended Saturday in the center of this quaint city of about 20,000 residents.

For Cancelada, what actually matters are what he calls "hot button" issues like health care, education and jobs. Even the obscure topic of prison reform is far more pressing to him than, say, worrying about Web sites being blocked by AT&T.

"Technology," shrugged the self-described Luddite, who admitted to obtaining an e-mail address only a year ago. "It's something I don't think much about."

Kayleen Stowell: Never heard of Net neutrality

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

It also didn't matter much to Kayleen Stowell, 66, a Mitt Romney devotee who's made phone calls for the candidate and who has attended nearly all of his New Hampshire events.

"I think the Internet targets all the young people, but I think it leaves out the older people who don't even have a computer," the retired trucking company employee from Londonderry, N.H., said as she awaited Romney's approach at a breakfast meeting at Mary Ann's diner in Derry, N.H., on the eve of Tuesday's primary election.

Stowell did say she believes the Feds "absolutely" should find a way to keep Internet porn from children.

At a booth across the chrome-accented restaurant, Kelly Parsons, 32, cradled her infant son, Christian, and admitted she'd never heard of Net neutrality either. Parsons professed to be reasonably tech-savvy but said technology policy issues had nothing to do with her decision to support Mitt Romney. Illegal immigration and terrorism were among her top concerns for the next president to confront.

Kelly Parsons: Worried about illegal immigration and terrorism

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

"He (Romney) has the resolve to deal with people who necessarily don't like us," she said as a waitress dropped off the check for breakfast with her two young children. "He cares about America, has values, has a family he loves."

Outside a Starbucks in Portsmouth, N.H., Ted Jankowski, 55, said he'd thrown his support behind Edwards because of the candidate's "detailed plan" for the future, not because of Net neutrality.

We found some outliers who do spend (at least some of) their evenings blogging about the arcana of copyright legislation and the Real ID Act.

Seth Cohn of Canterbury, N.H.: Ron Paul supporter deeply concerned with digital rights management legislation

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/News.com)

One is Seth Cohn, 37, who recently moved to Canterbury, N.H. We caught up to him after a Ron Paul speech in Nashua, where he volunteered that Internet and technology policy issues are "really important" in his choice for the next president. "Net neutrality is almost certainly going to continue to be an issue," said Cohn, a Web developer who's been online for well over a decade and even has a Usenet newsgroup devoted to him (yes, it's alt.fan.seth-cohn).

"It's all part of a bigger picture for me," he added. "If they're going to regulate the Internet, they're going to take over free speech." Also high on his list of priority issues is how to handle copyright and digital rights management technology.

We offered to send him a link to this article when it's published, but Cohn said not to worry: he has his own Google News alert set up for precisely this kind of situation. They don't call Ron Paul the Internet's favorite candidate for nothing.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report

NASHUA, N.H.--With less than a day before New Hampshire's primary election, it's starting to get ugly here.

And no, we're not just talking about the warmer temperatures turning pristine white snow to gray slush. On Sunday evening, Hillary Clinton's campaign accused Barack Obama's operatives of violating New Hampshire law by dispatching prerecorded "robocalls" to folks on the federal "do not call" list.

Clinton's camp says the messages are also illegal because they fail to disclose they're associated with the Obama campaign--instead, implying they're sponsored by the Planned Parenthood of Northern New England--until 38 seconds into the message. Under state law, such identifications must occur within 30 seconds.

"I'm really disappointed, and I'm just very, very sad to see that these tactics are being adopted by another campaign here in this Democratic primary," Cathy Sullivan, the Clinton campaign's New Hampshire coordinator, said in a conference call with reporters.

Clinton representatives said they were tipped off to the potential infraction by two supporters who called the campaign and claimed they had received the calls despite being on the do-not-call list.

We received no immediate response from the Obama camp, but according to other news outlets, the campaign is dismissing the charges, calling them a sign of desperation on the part of Clinton, who is trailing the Illinois senator here in most recent polls.

"Our disclaimer absolutely complies with the federal law and our vendor has assured us that he scrubbed the list for people on the do-not-call registry," Ned Helms, Obama's New Hampshire campaign co-chairman, said in an e-mail published by the Associated Press. "If this call went to someone who should not have received it, we will make sure the vendor takes every step to make sure this doesn't happen again," Helms said, in an e-mail from the Obama campaign.

The campaign also claims New Hampshire's do-not-call law does not apply to "presidential preference primaries."

The use of the robocalls at all illustrates that despite the amount of attention that media has been giving to the Internet's prominence in this year's primary, more traditional forms of getting out the vote are still out in full force. Across New Hampshire on Monday, most of the major candidates are traveling to local eateries, schools, and cultural centers to take a last stab at swaying undecided voters to their sides.

The allegations arrive as a new USA Today-Gallup poll found Obama to be in the lead among candidates in Tuesday's contest, with 39 percent of the support, compared with Clinton's 29 percent. That contrasts with a poll released just before Saturday night's debates, in which Obama and Clinton were in a dead heat, with each candidate racking up 33 percent of local voters' backing.

Update at 11:08 a.m. PST: The same USA Today-Gallup poll from Monday, by the way, found Sen. John McCain leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 4 percentage points in the Republican race.

During the ABC-Facebook Democratic and Republican debates in Manchester, N.H., Saturday night, the social-networking site launched a politics "Soundboard" (screenshot shown here) that racked up more than 35,000 comments during the East Coast broadcast alone.

MANCHESTER, N.H.--It sounded like a good idea at first: let Internet users be part of, virtually speaking, the Democratic and Republican presidential debates on Saturday evening by posting comments on a special Facebook message board.

But it turned out to be one of those ideas that may be better in theory than in practice. During the East coast broadcast of the debates, Facebook users posted around 35,000 "Soundboard" messages, meaning that at perhaps 50 characters each, that's some 1.75 million characters to read during an approximately three-hour period. All of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is only 700,000 characters.

To read all those messages, at 20 per page, you'd have to refresh your browser's screen 1,750 times. That's not even counting comments posted by west coast Facebook users (Facebook, which co-sponsored the debate here with ABC News, said the west coast figures were not yet available).

No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well.

Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing.

... Read more

Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign bus rolled into the South Nashua, N.H., campus of prominent defense contractor BAE Systems for a town hall meeting with employees on Friday afternoon.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

SOUTH NASHUA, N.H.--Sen. John McCain may have dubbed his campaign bus the "Straight Talk Express," but his Friday campaign visit to a prominent military technology maker here arguably sent some mixed messages.

On one hand, the Arizona senator lavished praise on BAE Systems' employees and products, which he credited with keeping "young Americans" safe in dangerous zones. BAE, which makes "fighting vehicles" and other equipment frequently used in Iraq, also happens to be one of New Hampshire's largest employers.

"Keep going and keep doing what you're doing," he told an overflow crowd gathered at the global company's snow-covered campus here. "Al-Qaida is on the run, and they're not defeated."

Yet the longtime foe of wasteful government spending couldn't resist taking the opportunity, in response from one audience member's question, to attack the current set-up for awarding defense contracts, of which companies like BAE tend to be multimillion-dollar beneficiaries. (On Friday, for instance, the company announced it had won a $29 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security to test and install a missile defense system on American passenger planes.)

"I'm hard on people who waste the taxpayers' hard-earned dollars," McCain said during his visit, which lasted about a half hour.

He was referring to a past scandal involving contracts between the Air Force and Boeing. Perhaps naturally, he had nothing but kind words for the BAE Systems employees whose votes he was courting Friday, even if BAE itself is no stranger to controversy. Just last fall, watchdog groups accused members of Congress of proposing some $25 million in defense spending bill earmarks that would benefit the British company.

Like Sen. Hillary Clinton on Friday morning, McCain also shifted his talk to energy in response to an audience member's question about his plans. McCain called for taking advantage of "interesting technology" designed to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. He proposed increased use of electric cars and of nuclear power, which he deemed a necessary "part of any real meaningful reduction we make in greenhouse gas emissions."

Recent polls peg McCain as the Republican favorite in Tuesday's primary election here. He already has at least one avowed fan at BAE: CEO Walter Havenstein, who couldn't resist divulging at the event that he'd already voted for the senator, absentee-style, because of a commitment that will put him out of state during the live contest.

Ron Paul speaks to a rally adjacent to Google's headquarters last year.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh)

NASHUA, N.H.--An online protest is growing over presidential candidate Ron Paul's exclusion from a Fox News debate here on Sunday, even though other Republicans receiving fewer votes in Iowa or scoring lower in the polls were invited.

Paul received a fifth-place 10 percent of the GOP vote in Iowa's caucus Thursday, ahead of Rudy Giuliani, who received 3.5 percent. He's also ahead of Fred Thompson in New Hampshire polls, polling 7 percent to Thompson's 2 percent.

But both Giuliani and Thompson still appear to be invited to Sunday evening's debate sponsored by Fox News and the New Hampshire Republican Party. Paul isn't.

That's irked many Paul supporters, who responded by flooding a Fox News Web page on the debate with over 580 comments and creating a "Protest Fox" Web site. It says: "We need to send a message to Fox's Rupert Murdoch & his fellow Neocon buddies that he is not Musharraf and the US is not Pakistan, yet! Fox News cannot just stifle public opinion. debate and impact a primary election by excluding Ron Paul just because they don't like his message of freedom and liberty."

They're also planning protests outside Fox News affiliates. Another likely protest site is Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., which has given Fox News space for a broadcast studio. That's where Sunday's debate will take place.

So why the exclusion? It's hard to say, and Fox News hasn't exactly been forthcoming on this point.

For his part, Paul said he thinks it's because he--alone among Republican candidates--opposes the war in Iraq. After being excluded, Paul explained that he views Fox News as a "propagandist" for the war with editorial views that are hardly in keeping with traditional conservative limited-government principles, according to a story by the Boston Globe.

Adding to the intrigue is that the New Hampshire Republican Party, which is co-sponsoring the debate and presumably has some say in who's invited, published a statement this week saying the media should not be in the "business of excluding serious candidates and talks were continuing with Fox."

And adding to the insult, at least for Paul supporters, is that ABC News is sponsoring a debate at the same place--Saint Anselm College--the evening before. Unlike the Fox News debate on Sunday, however, Ron Paul will be invited to participate.

At the start of a new drive in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday's primary, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton addresses hundreds of supporters in a Nashua airplane hangar.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

NASHUA, N.H.--In a new push to win over New Hampshire voters on Friday, Hillary Clinton highlighted a technological facet of her pledge to revamp the nation's healthcare system: ditch paper medical records.

Digitizing the vital documents will not only cut an estimated $77 billion in costs, but "much more important than that, we would save lives," the New York senator said Friday morning to a few hundred cheering, sign-waving supporters huddled around the stage in a drafty airplane hangar here.

Clinton's early-morning return to the Granite State, which is scheduled to hold its primary election Tuesday, followed a third-place finish in Iowa's first-in-the-nation contest on Thursday night. According to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Friday, Clinton is currently leading the Democratic pack in the New Hampshire race, with 32 percent to Sen. Barack Obama's 26 percent.

Clad in a dark suit, Clinton touched on the economy ("it's going to be a tough economic year," she predicted, citing the most recent unemployment statistics) and her electability (she has the mettle to "withstand the Republican attack machine," she said) before taking questions from the audience.

Her pledge to create a nationwide, electronic health-record-keeping system came in response to a comment from an audience member who, by Clinton's description, "lost her daughter because her medical records were not readily available."

"We go online to buy things from Mongolia, we go online to do our banking, but we can't go online in a secure, encrypted, confidential way to get access to our medical records," she lamented.

Some hospitals and medical offices, of course, are already wired, but right now, most people aren't able to view their records electronically. Naturally, companies like Microsoft have been plotting ways to fill that void. At least one recent study found security and privacy vulnerabilities remain as e-health advocates forge ahead with their plans.

In any case, it's not a new idea on Clinton's part, as she has been working with other senators for years on passing legislation aimed at getting electronic medical records systems off the ground.

Nor is it a partisan issue. President Bush long called for greater computerization of health records, and former president Bill Clinton has also advocated for such action in recent months. (He, by the way, was on hand Friday to introduce his wife and daughter Chelsea, who made a smiling but silent appearance just before her mother's speech.)

In between discussion of health care, troop withdrawal from Iraq, and protecting manufacturing jobs within the United States, Clinton also revived talk of her previously-unveiled plans to enlist higher-tech alternatives in her energy policy.

As part of her push to wean the United States off foreign oil, Clinton vowed again to yank subsidies from oil companies and to require them to pay into a "Strategic Energy Fund" that will bankroll research on new technologies and clean, renewable energy sources.

"We're serious this time," she said. "America is really serious."