Okay, while we’re passing the time on important and frenetic matters of late campaign note, let’s allow ourselves a bit of diversion with a contest.
What is the lamest incumbent member of Congress website? Not their official House or Senate page. But their campaign website. And only incumbents. If you open the contest to challengers, some campaigns are so underfunded and so nominal in nature that there’s almost no point. If they don’t have enough money to put together a halfway respectable website maybe that’s because the campaign doesn’t have any money and it’s not even a serious campaign. Any incumbent though has at least enough money to put together a half way respectable web presence. And lame can mean so many things to so many people. So let’s try to focus on flagrant cheapness, moronic design and other such characteristics rather than high falutin’ concepts of web design or interactivity.
Okay, with that out of the way, let me nominate Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) from North Carolina’s 5th district. Foxx’s site is pretty decent on general cheapness of design and all around lameness. But it was cheapness that jumped out at me. If you go to the “campaign photos” section of her site and click for 2006, you can see a little Flash player that breezes you through photos of Foxx pressing the flesh with constituents and also sharing a few quality moments with Rep. Hastert, who apparently visited the district before he became the national poster boy for fifty-something horndogs chatting up high school students.
But what caught my eye was the little trailer line cruising over the top of the pictures: “Created with the trial version of CoffeeCup Flash Photo Gallery www. coffeecup.com Click here to Buy Now!”
I heard Republcans were having a hard time deciding where to put their money resources. But I had no idea it was this bad.
Following up on the trialware ad, I stopped by the Coffee Cup website (“fresh software. warm people”) to see how much a copy of CoffeeCup Flash Photo Gallery costs. Apparently $34.
That’s pretty hard up.
But still. There are 435 members of the House. There must be worse out there. Send in your nominations.
Late Update: Wow, that didn’t take long. TPM Reader CL just nominated the website of Rep. Wally Herger (R-CA) and I think it may even knock Foxx out of the running.
It’s like sub-lame.
