Ambitious politicians don't need to be urged to run for higher office. But "draft" websites, which the netroots used to put mavericks like Wesley Clark and Jim Webb on the map, are becoming a standard political exercise. And that's probably a bad thing for Internet politics.

When Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president in an online video, it was a gesture towards the undeniable fact that candidates must make a minimal effort online, and must at the very least pay lip service to the netroots and the political blogosphere. As David Weinberger recently pointed out, although Hillary calls her campaign a conversation, the execution actually suggests "a TV-style interview answering safe questions with safer answers."

Joe Trippi is one of the few political consultants who speaks frankly, even to the detriment of his clients, and loves democracy even more than he loves politics. I caught up with him for an hour-long conversation about his work for the John Edwards campaign, why Hillary Clinton might be the Howard Dean of 2008, and how the Iowa caucus is like the Internet.

They won't tell you on TV, but people are watching Obama's new speech. Disintermediation is alive on YouTube.

What do anime, a nude Charlotte Ross and Barack Obama have in common?

A new website is talking back to Obama's YouTube video hits.

Can Obama's "Yes We Can" speech become a hit song?
John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Common, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Scarlett Johansson think so.

The Obama Campaign does not stress its historic Internet success. It does not even discuss the web as an obvious metaphor for Obama's candidacy: An open frontier where race and gender recede, new ideas vanquish the old, and citizens converse and connect in ways that the prior generations would never understand, let alone support. Perhaps that is simply because no presidential candidate wants to sound like the next Howard Dean. Or maybe, the campaign knows that you don't build a movement by talking about it. You do it, person by person, until one day, everyone can see it.

Hillary Clinton is under fire for planted questions again, but this time her critics are wrong.

It's a web politics battle: Disintermediation v. Interactivity...

"Point out the bounce!" (As Jay-Z would say.)