Opinion: More Democrats than Republicans need a life

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A few weeks ago the editorial board observed how Democratic presidential candidates -- particularly the longshots -- were much more active than their Republican counterparts on the social-networking front. Most of the Democrats had links on their Web sites to pages on MySpace and other popular online hubs, but none of the Republicans did. Still, as the entertaining site Techpresident.com notes, when candidates don’t step up to the plate with their own MySpace sites, their supporters do it for them. And then we in the media find a way to turn it into a horse race, which in this case means counting the number of ‘friends’ the candidates’ MySpace pages have attracted. As we near the end of the first furlong, by Techpresident’s count, Sen. Barack Obama’s unofficial page has pulled ahead of the pack, with about 40,000. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s unofficial page has more than 22,000, while former Sen. John Edwards’ official page has drawn more than 11,000. (Edwards may have diluted his numbers a bit by setting up official pages on an additional 23 -- count ‘em, 23 -- social sites as of today. There may be more added tomorrow.) The top Republican page among the seven tracked by Techpresident: Ron Paul, with 2,243 friends. Hey, it’s still early -- no one’s had a macaca moment yet.