Newt Gingrich Probably Wishes He’d Reserved NewtGingrich.Com With GoDaddy
Because someone else grabbed it up, and boy are they having fun:
A note to all future presidential candidates — buy yourname.com.
Newt Gingrich provides the latest example of a campaign domain name oversight that is coming back to embarrass him. Gingrich owns Newt.org, but NewtGingrich.com is controlled by someone with very different motives.
The website alternately redirects to a slew of websites with negative association to Newt: from the homepage of Tiffany, to the Freddie Mac homepage, to negative news articles about his campaign.
A search of the Wayback Machine shows that “The Gingrich Group” controlled the eponymous domain name, in 2001, but by 2002 it became home to an internet slot website.
Go check it out — NewtGingrich.com — I suggest visiting more than once to get the full effect.
Update: Zeke Miller reports via Twitter that the owners of the domain are apparently selling it on Craigslist.
It’s a fairly common tactic among lower level races (state house on down) to buy related domains and put fake campaign sites up. It’s sleazy, it’s underhanded, but it’s common. I guess Newt’s campaign manager felt they were immune?
Or perhaps s/he hasn’t been in the trenches in a long time.
I guess he couldn’t use some of that Freddie Mac money to set up auto-renewal for his domains?
This is a rookie mistake that I would not have expected from Newt. You’d think that with the various antics around domain names (white house dot com has probably caused a lot of IT inquiries…) that every candidate had staked out the most common iterations before announcing.
I will raise you one. Go visit IamNewtGingrich.com–no redirects, just the straight story, plan and simple. Newt for who and what he is and may become.
@Neil Hudelson: Go visit IamNewtGingrich.com and follow the links
They should be ashamed, like Mitt.
Actually this is further evidence for my theory than he was never really serious about this President thing, but was surprised by his rise in the polls.