This run of primary elections featured an interesting trend in the world of political races: The draft craze. It started as a group of people interested in encouraging Illinois Senator Barack Obama to run for President. So Ben Stanfield, one of those interested in Obama running for president, started draftobama.org/, a site completely dedicated to encouraging Barack Obama to run for President, and for citizens to support Obama. The site featured a petition for supporters to sign, as well as information about Obama and how volunteers could help. When it launched in late 2006, it seemed like a long shot, because Obama had already announced that he wouldn't be running for President in 2008. Somewhere along the line, Obama's line of thought changed, and he's now sitting as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President.
While it's unclear whether the efforts of draftobama.org directly affected either Obama's decision to run or his success in the primaries, the site gained notoriety and many similar sites began to appear across the interwebs. There's a Draft Hillary site, a Draft Ron Paul, a Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President site, and even a Draft Mitt Romney for Senatesite, dedicated to encourage the former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate to try to unseat John Kerry as Senator of Massachusetts. And of course there are a few others, too.
First of all, I don't understand the purpose of the Draft Hillary site, since it was a foregone conclusion that she would run for President. The purpose of the draft site is to encourage someone to run for President, since the person cannot actually be drafted to be President, just to run. Stanfield addressed this on the front page of Draft Obama when he said Our work here on Draft Obama is over done, but the work to elect Senator Obama is just beginning. Second, I highly doubt these sort of sites have a large effect on candidates' decisions on whether or not to run. While it may be reassuring to see a group of people gathered to support said politician, internet support can be skewed. As we've seen with Ron Paul, widespread support on the internet doesn't always transfer over to widespread support among all citizens. Though it may have appeared to help, the creation of Draft Obama and Obama's current success probably aren't related. While there are certainly more useless sites around, the draft politician craze seems to be pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.