Pleased to see Hilary Rodham Clinton throwing her hat or is it bunnet into the ring for the race for Democratic presidential candidate in the United States. If someone like Hillary with all her insider experience doesn’t give it a go, who the hell will? I’ve seen some English press describe her as a potential “American Mrs. Thatcher”. Dear God No! Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. If anyone thinks that by voting for a woman you’ll get a kinder, gentler brand of politics you may be in for a shock. It’s a bruising game politics, “showbiz for ugly people”, internal party politics tend to make a virtue of backstabbing and taking advantage of any faux pas by your peers to climb a very greasy pole indeed. To get to the top you need a skin of asbestos, oh and truckloads of money. I think Hilary may benefit from the support of a lot of women who still haven’t quite forgiven Bill Clinton for “not having sex with that woman”, cough. Many at the time thought that Hilary conducted herself with admirable strength of character in public despite this crushing episode in her private life and it may be this that strikes a chord in female voters memories and sympathy rather than any high and mighty policy stance. Will the US campaign be about issues or character? The Democrats don’t need another Kerry, worthy but dull. The president is a different role. Charisma is compulsory, and as George W has shown, brains are optional.
Given how many “dirty tricks” there have been known to be pulled in negative advertising/campaigning in politics with the battleground moving away from TV/Radio/Press to the internet will we start to see electronic versions of skulduggery? What if a candidate using the web for fund raising for a campaign just so happened to have a DoS attack on their website whilst their opponents stayed up? Or with a lot of sites moving to Open Source content management systems and blogs it would only take one security patch to be missed for any nefarious opposition to take advantage. Beef up your security teams and for any presidential candidates buying a one year domain name from GoDaddy you have switched on the auto-renew haven’t you? Don’t want your virtual branding to be expiring next year, do you? Barack Obama’s in it for the long haul, his domain’s secured until 28-Dec-2015, you can’t say he’s not planning ahead 
