Point, Click, Win!

By John F. Dickerson

Kimberly Kuebrich Yordi did not find Bill Bradley on eBay. That's where she found Holiday Barbie to add to her collection of 30 dolls. For the 39-year-old mother of three, her home-office computer was no place for politics. Then she learned about billbradley.com Last week she signed on, studied the candidate's positions and learned the arcane incantations necessary to vote for him at the Iowa caucuses. "I'm comfortable going to the caucus and not feeling inadequate about the person I am supporting," she says of the process she ducked in previous years. "I wouldn't be going if it weren't for the computer."

Two hundred out-of-state volunteers answered a similar call from Al Gore, banging on Iowa doors for the Vice President last week after being summoned through the Internet. Conservative firebrand Alan Keyes beckoned followers from an audio Web banner. "You want conscience back in America? Put principle back in our lives," he blared from the computer speakers of targeted Iowa and New Hampshire Net surfers. On the campaign bus in Des Moines, an aide for publishing tycoon Steve Forbes beamed a Web-page update from a wireless keyboard the size of an Altoids box. And last week journalists couldn't answer the e-mail chimes fast enough as one campaign and then another fired missives attacking opponents.

Wheee! In one presidential cycle, cyberpolitics has gone from being the quirky obsession of a college kid and his gizmo at the back of campaign headquarters to something far sleeker--e-campaigning. The capital's hard-bitten direct-mail and fund-raising pros are reshaping their careers, slinging e-jargon e-nauseam and looking to those same kids for Web strategies. Millions of dollars have been raised for presidential candidates online, and voters who may not know about any of them are being targeted at their terminals and put to work.

Mobilizing supporters through cyberspace is one of the great advantages of e-campaigning. Last Tuesday, Senator John McCain's campaign, under attack by George W. Bush's forces for its tax-cut plan, sent out 50,000 e-mails to its volunteers across the U.S. Within 12 hours, 1,100 of them had responded, been given a sample script, and were working the phones.

Said "gee whiz" yet? Don't. Campaigning still takes place in the real world--on doorsteps, soapboxes and televisions. In a TIME/CNN poll, only 17% of adults in the survey said they use the Internet to gain access to politics. But digital democracy 2.0 is showing hints of just what politics will be like when most of America has faster hookups: town halls held in a hundred living rooms, where voters can interact with their representatives.

And so the information gathering will go both ways. Already the San Francisco-based political-consulting firm Aristotle matches voting patterns with the personal information many of us give away online when signing up for services like free e-mail. The result is an ability to target voters from specific states as they roam the Internet, enabling candidates to tailor their message more effectively. When McCain needed assistance in getting on the ballot in Virginia, the firm helped craft a banner ad on various websites that invited users to print out a copy of the petition they had to sign. Crude for now, the technology nevertheless offers more precision than TV ads, and in the future may be able to help candidates pitch their Social Security message to seniors or their health-care cures to soccer moms.

No campaign has spent more time and energy on the Internet than Forbes'. And no campaign needs it more. With most pundits writing off the second gambit of the multimillionaire, Forbes is eager to eliminate the middleman and get right into the breakfast nook. His campaign has boasted it will spend close to $1 million on its Internet strategy and use the technology as John Kennedy used television in the 1960 campaign. Beyond advertising, Forbes has kept his faithful marinated in daily e-mails targeted at their interests. The campaign has tried to re-create the old ward-politics feel, assigning "e-precincts" and "e-captains" to empower volunteers to gather supporters by e-mail across the U.S. Says Rick Segal, the Forbes Webmaster, who sits in on the campaign's strategy sessions: "How will we know if the Internet paid off? If Steve Forbes wins Iowa."

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards with Bradley and Mitch Frank/New York

With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards with Bradley and Mitch Frank/New York