January, 2007 Archive

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Rudy & Newt Co-Author Op-Ed on Iraq

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 12th, 2007 12:44 am

This one caught my eye. Two of the potential heavyweights in the Republican field have teamed up for this op-ed on Iraq in the morning’s Wall Street Journal. The Giuliani-Gingrich op-ed addresses the revival of Iraq’s economy and how to apply the lessons of New York City’s turnaround to create concrete results on the ground.

Tagged: iraq newt gingrich rudy giuliani

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Harry Reid’s Culture of Corruption

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 11th, 2007 10:44 pm

Well, that didn’t take long. In just the fifth vote of the new Congress, Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy used procedural skulduggery to sink Senator Jim DeMint’s earmark reform amendment in the Senate. Here’s how it was described by a Senate staffer to Robert Bluey at Human Events:

The Senate just rejected an attempt by Sen. Durbin, the Majority Whip for the Democrats, to kill a DeMint amendment to add Nancy Pelosi’s earmark disclosure requirements to the Senate lobbying reform bill. Sen. Durbin’s motion to kill the Pelosi earmark rule was rejected by a vote of 51-46, with most Democrats voting to kill the amendment. Under normal procedures, the amendment would then be adopted by unanimous consent since the Senate was on record supporting the amendment. However, Sen. Kennedy took the unprecedented step of blocking adoption of the amendment.

On only the fifth vote of the new Congress, Senate Democrats are now on record opposing common sense earmark reform — reform that has already been adopted by the House under the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — and are on record using obstruction tactics to thwart the will of the Senate and the American public on earmark reform. Senate Democrats are also on record opposing the comprehensive earmark disclosure requirements crafted by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Under the earmark definition in the underlying Senate bill, 95 percent of earmarks would have been exempt from disclosure. Under the Pelosi rule, nearly all earmarks are required to be disclosed.

Bluey has the full rundown, including the must-see video of Reid dragging his feet on the DeMint amendment and attacking Pelosi’s “100 Hours” for its lack of “thoughtful consideration.”

Jim DeMint has been one of the rock stars of the new Congress. And Senator McConnell is no wallflower either. Make sure to thank Tim Chapman and Jon Henke when you run across them next.

Tagged: congress harry reid jim demint pork

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Asymmetric Warfare and the Way Forward

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 10th, 2007 11:09 pm

Forgive me for broadening the discussion a bit, but today it felt like we saw the War on Terror come full circle.

Early in the day brought word that we had possibly nabbed one of the bad guys in a Somalia strike. It’s a reminder of everything the War on Terror can be — the long arm of justice reaching and taking out evil from this life. And doing so with startling efficiency — a tribute to what asymmetric warfare and just the right touch can do.

Tonight, we saw the President explain something more difficult — a challenge that will require boots on the ground — but one that will continue to keep the terrorists constantly on the run from Iraq to Somalia to tribal Pakistan.

This war isn’t just Iraq. It won’t be over with Iraq, even with victory in Iraq. Achieving that victory and future victories requires unbending will. What is happening in Iraq is a desperate final-ditch struggle by the jihadists to preserve what influence they have left in a new Iraq. That struggle has exacted a painful toll — one that makes clear just how much al-Qaeda fears our success.

My bottom-line thinking about this war remains: “If they’re shooting at you, you must be doing something right.” The country needed to be brought closer to recognizing this, and that’s what the President did tonight.

Tagged: bush iraq somalia war on terror

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A Fresh Look at Iraq

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 10th, 2007 8:01 pm

Red State has plenty of good comments on what the President should say tonight. Just keep scrolling down.

California Yankee’s got the White House fact sheet.

Share your thoughts in the comments. Speech begins at 9 p.m. EST.

Tagged: bush iraq

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Where Are the Goalposts for Online Politics?

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 10th, 2007 2:31 pm

Bill Beutler is knocking ABC PAC for its fundraising totals and engaging what smacks of some end-zone dancing for ActBlue. This part in particular is the kind of apples-and-oranges comparison I warned about earlier:

Note the figures. Yes, it’s all this cycle. The top 5 presidential candidates on ActBlue have received about $434,000, while all candidates on ABC PAC have collected exactly $298.

Of course, $428,854 of that total comes from one candidate, John Edwards, who is using ActBlue as his exclusive online fundraising provider. If Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and Brownback all channeled their contributions through ABC PAC, the numbers for it would look a lot different as well.

Bill does make a fair point: ActBlue is more of a Web 2.0 site, where users can sign up for accounts. There’s a reason for you to come back. It is long established and has achieved a baseline traffic number it will get just by showing up. ABC PAC isn’t quite there yet, something PAC advisor and ex-Ruffini boss Mike Turk was perfectly upfront about:

ActBlue has been in development for two years, and already raised north of six million dollars. To compare the functionality of a site that has been online for less than two full days, and which publicly states it is trying to put together funds for further development to a site like the one ActBlue is today is a bit disingenuous. … Given full funding, full functionality and a full catalog of candidates, ABC PAC has the potential to meet and exceed what ActBlue has done - and we plan to do so.

Bill expected it to be built by now, but speaking as someone with a bit of experience in the development world, these things don’t get built in the final three months of a campaign when all involved were a bit preoccupied with the 2006 elections. Strategically, you want to build these types of things in an off-year, and 2007 is such a year.

Ultimately, I have a bigger complaint to lodge about how outside observers cover the blogosphere and new media in politics: they tend to focus on the small fry instead of the big picture. If there is an apples-to-apples comparison to be made, it’s between ActBlue’s $6,000 towards presidential “draft funds” vs. ABC PAC’s more modest number for essentially the same thing. The salient point, I think, is not that ActBlue won, but that in the world of political fundraising, neither number is very good. $6,000 is nowhere near what ActBlue can do and $298 is nowhere near what ABC PAC shown it can do, to say nothing of the $1-2 billion that will be spent on the next election. Why is that? Because people want to contribute to a living, breathing candidate, not “prospective candidates” who may not ultimately run. A “draft fund” sounds like a cool idea (I was a big fan conceptually) but one that probably doesn’t hold up well in the real world.

To make a broader point of this seems pretty tangential. “Draft funds” are the stepchild of third-party viral fundraising which are themselves less lucrative than e-mail/website based fundraising. The even bigger picture is the campaign’s overall fundraising picture and how a good online performance can upend the dynamics of a race. We need to put the goalposts in the right place. This is not meant to poo-poo the blogosphere/ActBlue/ABC PAC (they are best seen as proxies for what’s going on in a larger universe of online influentials) but to acknowledge where we actually are and to challenge the blogosphere to play an ever-larger role in the process.

Tagged: abc pac actblue online politics strategy

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Overclocked: iPhone Lust Edition

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 9th, 2007 11:45 pm

Here’s what’s new from the best damn tech blog in the land: a full rundown of the iPhone, the good, the bad, and the unknown; the quest for good open-source website analytics; plus a server that looks like a stack of CDs.

Subscribe here.

Tagged: iphone overclocked

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Dean Barnett Forgets One Thing

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 9th, 2007 11:43 am

Over at Hugh’s, Dean says the Money Primary and the Media Primary will be important in 2007.

I’ll add a third: The Internet Primary.

The press has traditionally focused on money and media because there’s little else of substance to cover in ‘07. There are no rallies, not a whole lot of watercooler buzz in Middle America, and the closest thing you’ll get to casting ballots is a straw poll. The Money and Media Primaries don’t tell you a lot about the grassroots, except as anecdotes that filter into media stories from time to time.

The Internet changes that. We can get a pretty accurate sense of how people who don’t live in Washington, D.C. see the race in real time. And it’s more than blogs and elite opinion journals. It’s the size of candidate email lists, sites like ABC PAC when they start raising money for actual candidate committees, Facebook groups, and all forms of online activism, the metrics of which will be more transparent (and media-friendly) than ever in 2007. The difference between this primary and the other two? It’s the best proxy for real activism and enthusiasm on the ground.

Right now, it looks like a pretty close race between Rudy, Newt, and Romney, but the situation online can turn on a dime.

Tagged: 2008 grassroots online politics

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If This Blog Were Congress…

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 9th, 2007 6:34 am

California would lead the way with 57 Congressional seats (that’s the Hugh effect), Texas would get 32, Virginia 30, New York a measly 23, and the District of Columbia 19. Those are readership stats culled from Google Analytics.

Among Wire readers, it gets even more interesting. New York and Virginia each have 47. California has 35, and DC has 23. Other states that are overrepresented include Minnesota with 19, Massachusetts with 18, Utah with 13, South Carolina with 11, and Iowa with 9. That’s the America that’s spending every waking moment thinking ‘08 right now.

Google Analytics really is a fantastic tool that’s helping me zero in on patterns of site use. For example: people clicking in off a 3- or 4-day old Instapundit or Hewitt link aren’t new people — they’re the same people who clicked two days before. People seek out the old posts so they can re-click the links they like. That’s horribly inefficient. Enough already! Bookmark the site. Del.icio.us it. Better yet: Subscribe or add your email at the top of the page.

Tagged: google analytics stats

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Mitt Romney’s $6.5 Million Day

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 8th, 2007 10:28 pm

Time to add something new to the bag of tricks.

Today, Mitt Romney kicked off his fundraising campaign with a twist: a massive call-center for well-heeled fundraisers to dial through their Rolodexes and shake loose the early dough. The whole thing was masterminded by 28-year-old Romney aide Spencer Zwick and powered by ComMitt, an intranet for fundraisers powered by Salesforce (let’s hear it for COTS!). This is probably the kind of tool that wouldn’t be worth building unless you actually sat 400 people down in front of it, which is exactly what they did.

I was initially a skeptic. This is a great process story, but it doesn’t really give you the grassroots warm-and-fuzzies that you’d expect with a formal rollout. All of that said, you can’t argue with results, with $6.5 million pledged or raised for the Romney campaign.

Timing aside, this is the kind of thing we should be seeing more of in ‘08 and beyond. The most precious resource in any campaign is the candidate’s time. The first half of the year will see each of the Big Three traveling to an unholy number of cities to do an unfathomable number of fundraising events. What’s more, these events are very expensive to put on.

If something like this allows a campaign to shave a few fundraising events off the schedule, giving the candidate the opportunity to spend more time with the voters, then campaigns will have taken a significant step into the 21st century.

Tagged: 2008 mitt romney strategy

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