I contacted the big six candidates, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

If the way the candidates are running their web site businesses is any indication of how they will be running our country in 2008 we are in deep trouble.  The first problem is that some of the candidates cannot distinguish between a “small media” inquiry and a potential voter.  They ALL want our doantions which is hard currency and they want our votes. 

This is where the big problem lies.  Try and find any information on the candidates web sites about US Small Businesses, there are only 25,000,000 of them in the United States employing 51% of the work force and providing substantial receipts to the Treasury in terms of tax revenue funding things like the War in Iraq.  Try and find anything about senior citizens issues or medicare or the cost of prescription drugs, you will not see it.  The good news is we did find 3 mentions about our veterans on McCain’s, Obama’s and Clinton’s web sites.

John Edwards was on the small business committiee when he was in the Senate but right now he seems to be concentrating his efforts on poverty.  Mitt Romney was a small business owner and moved to large business.  McCain’s camp did say that there was a possibility for an interview which would be great and we will see if it actually materializes and he wants to address the 25 Million small businesses by doing an interview with one of them.

Working with Eric Graham a web site conversion expert we produced a Webinar and reviewed the big six candidate web sites.  We were looking for solutions from the candidates as opposed to issues.  We were also looking for information on three key groups of people and how the candidates addressed them: Small Businesses, Senior Citizens and Veterans.  All three groups add up to over 75 million voters.  We thought that the candidates would have some information on these key groups in their web sites.  We thought wrong.  You will not find much at all.  There appears to be a lot of empty suits or web sites all asking for money and votes, not much else.

The solution for the candidates, the media and the American public is this.  The candidates put all of their “issues” into an RSS feed going out of their web sites.  Next to the “issues” are their positions and SOLUTIONS.  Each time they go on the campaign trail they update this content framework and make it available to the different folks who subscribe to the RSS feeds.  I’d like to put this challenge out there to all candidates to come up with a top 25 issues/solutions to put into their RSS feeds.

Jim Peake, jim@mysuccessgateway.com, 48 is a PoliticsOnline Contributing Editor, an Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner, Founder & CEO of My Success Gateway, LLC which is an information provider, a “consumer reports” ranking engine & community for entrepreneurs and small business.