Stories that loom large at breakfast can go stale by the dinner hour. The campaigns have assimilated this pace. The Bush and Gore teams are now e-mailing reporters their rebuttal to the other guy's announcement before the other guy actually makes it. So much campaign news now happens in cyberspace that a journalist arguably gets a better sense of what's going on by sitting in front of a computer than by traveling on the campaign trail. But as much as the Internet is reshaping political journalism, one could argue that it has yet to change politics very much.
Pollsters still measure public opinion by telephone.
The candidate who focused most on the Web's potential this year was Steve Forbes. But Forbes was less of a factor in 2000 than he was in 1996 - when he ran without using the Net. This seemingly glacial pace of change has disappointed many who hoped 2000 would prove to be the Net's 1960. For political junkies, the date is shorthand for the first nationally televised presidential debate and the last time a new communications medium transformed politics. Polling showed that voters who heard the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on the radio thought Nixon won it.