A Hothouse Plant

Internet politics is nice, but it can't beat the effective grind of old-style politics:

News.com's Declan McCullagh points to an interesting bit of Super Tuesday data: Barack Obama lost Silicon Valley to Hillary Clinton.

...Statewide, Clinton beat Obama by 9.7 points, 52.0 percent to Obama's 42.3 percent. But in Santa Clara county, home to the biggest tech companies in the country, Clinton got 54.8 percent and Obama got 39.3 percent -- a 15.5 point margin.

...There is no doubt, too, which candidate won the hearts and minds of SiliValley types. Many of the candidates were invited to speak to Googlers, but only Obama said anything to appeal to them. When CEO Eric Schmidt asked Obama a software engineering question during a session at the company's Mountain View campus -- "What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?" -- the senator replied with a joke only Googlers would get: "The bubble sort would be the wrong way to go," he said.

And look at the Internets! Obama's got, by far, the most followers on Facebook and the savviest YouTubers. Everyone online who's not supporting Ron Paul seems to be for him.

But looking at the Internets is the problem. The Web tells us little about what's going on in the real world. McCullough credits Clinton's win to a good ground operation; Obama does well online, he says, because clicking buttons is easier than going to vote.

That's probably right. More fundamentally, though, maybe it's time to start thinking about the Internet as a precious, blessed alien culture completely foreign to everyplace else, kind of like Japan. Indeed, this is old news: Howard Dean's explosion four years ago pretty much proved that what happens online stays online.