Either the economy improves drammatically over the next 12 months or so, or Pres Obama will lose by a wide margin. The IT infrastructure of his campaign is irrelevant.

Bravo to the parent! I would only add that the absence of the autonomy of the states and the subversion of personal liberties in favor of a strong, centralized Federal government has prevented, in my opinion, the intention of the Founders to facilitate competition amongst the states with respect to developing good government. In an America where the states were properly autonomous, the states would be in competition with each other such that well governed states might attract more citizens, while poorly governed states might lose citizens to their better governed neighbors. The effect of the citizenry's ability to 'vote with their feet' might very well hasten the adoption of better government policies for ALL states, and consequentially, the nation as a whole.

I have an eCommerce site using USPS to retrieve Zip+4 info for shipping addresses. In my case, the problem was not that the USPS service failed, but rather that it succeeded and returned empty zip code and plus4 information for the requested address. Had the service failed, my site would have experienced no issue whatsoever. It is the fact that the USPS service returned a valid 'success' response that included empty zip and plus4 values that caused the problem. Luckily in my case, this only resulted in a few orders having an empty zip code, rather than any kind of system crash. However, the empty zips caused my client considerable consternation. Of course, once I identified the cause of the problem, I added code to validate the returned zip and plus4 values from the USPS service, even when the USPS response does not indicate any error condition.