Originally published at: Visit Bob Dole's 1996 campaign website | Boing Boing
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Has anyone managed to decipher the hieroglyphics yet?
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This is what web development looked like when I started in the biz. Nice of 4president.org for preserving these old relics, though in some ways the site looks cutting edge for its time: early use of CSS rules, no ugly image shims to keep the layout in place.
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I’ve never been a professional web designer, but I’ve been a web user pretty much since the beginning and my first thought when I saw this was, “wow, that looks pretty snazzy for 1996.”
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I wonder how quickly that would have loaded back in 1996. This might have counted as an image-heavy site back then.
That’s something I don’t miss about the early web- Larger files or sites were already slow, even before the general slowdown that kicked in around mid-day as the Americans came online.
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From the K-12 policy section of the site
school choice
In one sentence saying money isn’t the answer, in the next saying that funneling public funds into private schools is the solution for low income families.
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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Also, willful ignorance of statistical trends:
In the past 30 years, per-pupil spending on education has doubled, yet average SAT scores have dropped over 50 points.
This definitely has nothing to do with massive demographic shifts in the composition of the population that pursue higher education during an accelerating shift from a largely industrial economy to an information-based one.
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Back then most consumer users were on dial-up … and a lot of Web developers didn’t care because they were more interested in pushing the limits of the medium. Somehow I think that"s exactly the kind of dev or shop a GOP campaign would have hired.
Until…[cue Norm MacDonald impression]
“Dole is back! Dole is going to set the party straight again. After Dole has his breakfast brains…”
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I wonder if the pecan roll cookies are good.
I distinctly remembered Bob Dole mentioning his web site URL during the closing arguments of the first debate because it seemed like such a novelty at the time.
He verbally spelled out the “double-u double-u double-u dot…” part but I think he at least left out the “aech tee tee pee colon slash slash” part.
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The internet is a series of tubes, you know.
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Wrong old politician?
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Very interesting section on internet regulation - remember the “clipper chip”?!
http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/internet.htm
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deliberately conflating old politicians.
Honestly, at this point, they’re all pretty much interchangeable parts.
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My all-time favorite political bumper sticker is from that year:
**DOLE**
*for pineapple*
edit: hmm. formatting not working.
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Dole’s still around, like his campaign website. He’ll be hitting a hundred in a couple of years. One thing I found on the wikipedia page about Dole is a picture of him and his buddies way back when, which makes me think about that saying, something like the company you keep….
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Okay these 17 posts have been great but can we please talk about heroes being misspelled. American Heros? Was he reaching out to the immigrant Greek population? Oh god it burns.
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I figure he was trying to avoid looking like Dan Quayle.
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What, no mention of his team failing to grab the .COM domain name and having to use an alternate. How about Dole’s rushed blurting out of the URL at the debates? Even better, where is the parody web site created by the guy who grabbed the original domain? It was full with bad canned pineapple jokes and had a pure 90s pineapple ring tiled page backdrop.
Still, that brings back the memories. Again, thank you for not dancing the macarena.
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