(Crossposted from Comment is Free at Guardian Unlimited:)

In the US, the left is declaring victory … in the battle to win the internet. The Washington Post today declares a digital divide between Democrat and Republican online. I just got off the phone with a BBC reporter working on a story with a similar premise. They wonder whether the GOP has a prayer of catching up and whether there’s something inherent in their character that would prevent them from doing so.

But I say that the web efforts of all parties are so far pathetic. At the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York on Friday, the assembled politicogeeks agreed that no one in this race has embraced technology in the disruptive manner Howard Dean did in his advanced but otherwise losing campaign in 2004. This is a race of tortoise v tortoise. And it’s typically US-centric of us to ignore the greater strides made online in the UK, France, and Germany - by the right, as it happens, in all three.

Still, it’s true that among the slow, the Democrats are far ahead here. As the Post reports:

Looking at the websites of presidential candidates from the two parties, it found that former senator John Edwards’s site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat’s wife, Elizabeth, announced that she had a recurrence of cancer. That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).

There are other measures as well. No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another Democratic candidate, Sen Barack Obama of Illinois, on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, the social-networking triumvirate. The Democrats are ahead in the online money race.

Why? There are many likely reasons for this lag. The Republican candidates are, well, more conservative by character: digitally fuddy-duddyish. McCain, Brownback, Romney, et al are hardly hip and Giuliani — whose MySpace page is still private — is probably too controlling for the internet; Rudy needs no friends. That their party is not (yet) in opposition probably also plays a role; the internet is for rebels.

The Democratic candidates have, unquestionably, made better use of the internet’s tools. Obama, especially, is a leader in MySpace and YouTube (though the blog TechPresident revealed apparent manipulation of his video ratings there). Clinton has used YouTube to effectively present her positions, though she inexplicably stopped doing so weeks ago. The poorer candidates — Dodd, Kucinich, Biden — have made more enthusiastic use of the YouTube because they can’t afford real TV.

But there is so much more they all can and should be doing: giving us their stands on so many more issues, answering our questions (which I’ve urged voters to put on YouTube under the tag prezconference), showing us their more casual, less spun and scripted side. At the Personal Democracy Forum, there was no end of good suggestions for the candidates. Eric Schmidt, head of Google, suggested putting out no end of video in the hopes that we, the voters, would pass them around: the viral candidate.

I cannot help but contrast what we see in America with the ambitious internet video efforts of Nicolas Sarkozy in his campaign and David Cameron’s Webcameron in his opposition. Cameron is producing a downright reality show about himself. Republican online writer David All, quoted in that Washington Post story above, explained to me at the PDF conference that the Europeans may be ahead because they cannot use TV as American candidates do to win hearts and minds; YouTube becomes a new and free venue.

But I continue to hear the question here: If liberals are winning online in the US, is there something inherently liberal about online? I asked that question in a Guardian column a year ago: If broadcast TV was the medium of the left and cable and talk radio the media of the right, what is the internet? Libertarian? I concluded that it is a platform for any and all to coalesce around each other.

By appearances, liberals in America are much better at coalescing. There are many popular conservative blogs. But there are rousing communities around liberal blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD and the so-called net roots had a role in defeating their bete noir, Sen Joe Lieberman - though Lieberman went on to win the general election and had he switched parties, the net roots could have helped the Democrats lose their Senate majority. Beware drinking net root tea. A recent straw poll on MyDD bore utterly no resemblance to the polls (but then, neither did the volume of mainstream media coverage of Clinton v. Obama; see this post on my blog PrezVid contrasting these pulses). The blogosphere and the internet have grown too large to characterise them as if they are a constituency; they are instead platforms for all.

So has the American left won the internet? Yes. For now. But the battle has only just begun.