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"My thinking was: If I could actually help the party through my experience with technology, then why not?" Cyrus Krohn says about becoming eCampaign director for the RNC. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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Then micro-sites under GOP.com that targeted Obama were created -- with mixed success.

In early May, CanWeAsk.com allowed users to pose text and video questions for Obama. Though Krohn says more than 70,000 submissions were sent, many couldn't be posted on the site. "They weren't appropriate" is all he'd say. By Tuesday, only nine videos had been posted.

Last month, MeetBarackObama.com went live. On the site, a link labeled "Dr. NObama" leads to questions about Obama's position on offshore oil drilling. More creatively, there are widgets that anyone can post on their own blog. One features a clock counting the time (48 days 03 hours, also as of Tuesday afternoon) since Obama was invited to joint town hall meetings by McCain. Krohn says about 100,000 unique visitors went to the site on its first three days.

Krohn is the third person to head the RNC's eCampaign division. Patrick Ruffini, who served for about a year and a half, preceded him; he left and advised Rudy Giuliani in his primary run. Michael Turk, who ran President Bush's online operation in the 2004 campaign, inaugurated the job and lasted less than a year. Turk left when he butted heads with senior officials "about the direction and purpose" of the eCampaign division, he says. For one, he wanted to continue producing videos that "looked raw and informal and less like television."

Kelley McCullough, then RNC's chief of staff, said she disagreed with the strategy. In an interview, she declined to talk about Turk but said, "We understood the importance of developing a robust eCampaign at the RNC."

To outside observers, it seems that Krohn has been given more leeway than his predecessors. Under Krohn, GOP.com competes directly with Democrats.org, the DNC's online headquarters, they say.

"No doubt it, he's providing a level of expertise that we have not had in the party," says Soren Dayton of the PR firm New Media Strategies and co-founder of TheNextRight.com, a new conservative blog. "This is a guy who comes from the high-tech and media world. He actually understands how people consume media, how people interact with technology."

But Michael Bassik, head of interactive marketing at MSHC Partners, a Democratic communications firm, says Krohn can only do so much.

"Sure, you can build the best, most sophisticated, most interactive political site out there," Bassik says. "But at the end of the day, what counts online are the eyeballs. And objectively speaking, it seems that the Democrats are getting more eyeballs, at least right now."

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The way Krohn sees it, GOP.com is supposed to take a back seat to JohnMcCain.com.

But conservative online political operatives who've nervously watched BarackObama.com-- and, more specifically, the social networking portal MyBarackObama -- say Obama doesn't need Democrats.org. McCain, meanwhile, needs all the help he can get from GOP.com.