Dirty Laundry on A1 of the Post
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 21st, 2007 10:02 amRepublican Internet strategists David All and Mike Turk have been very critical about where our party is online. Today, those concerns are channeled on the front page of the Washington Post in a piece by Jose Antonio Vargas.
What are your thoughts on this article and how does it mirror your experiences online? In my pieces on online activism last week, some of you left extremely informative comments on why you do or don’t get involved online. I’d like to drill down some more. How do you see the blogosphere? As a tool for getting informed? Getting involved? Or both? And if you don’t participate, why not?
Without disagreeing with the entire piece, I’d like to point out a couple of substantive flaws in the article. While not exactly the world’s biggest deal, this is illustrative of how reporters spin the facts:
Furthermore, ABC PAC, the conservative fundraising site, has raised $385 so far for Republican presidential hopefuls; Act Blue, its liberal counterpart, has collected about $3 million for Edwards alone.
Yes, but as I pointed out last January, Edwards is using ActBlue as his fundraising vendor. Edwards is using the tool to drive all of his online donations while, by and large, no other candidate is using either site to drive to donations. Big difference. The true apples-to-apples comparison is with ActBlue’s “draft” and other candidate accounts, which to be fair, isn’t exactly favorable to our side either, but not exactly the $3 million to $385 blowout Vargas says it is. For perspective, Hillary Clinton has raised a grand total of $416 through ActBlue.
In light of current developments, I also find this observation pretty amusing:
“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past — they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message — is now an asset,” Leyden said. “All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.” …
Moulitsas will concede the influence of conservative blogs and Web sites in the successful attack on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during his 2004 presidential campaign, when he was accused of exaggerating his service record during the Vietnam War, and on CBS News for its reporting on Bush’s war record. He also concedes that Republicans have their own popular blogs, such as InstaPundit, RedState and Michelle Malkin’s — sites, he asserts, that are parts “of the Republican noise machine, affiliated to talk radio and Fox News.” Malkin, the doyenne of the conservative blogosphere, is a frequent contributor to Fox News.
I’d just point to the last 72 hours: the blogs absolutely raging against the President and Senators of their own party on the immigration deal. Or the RedState “war” on the House Republican leadership, which has inspired some over at Townhall to take issue. I don’t think that’s exactly the picture of drones marching in lockstep with our leadership.
Both sides absolutely love to paint themselves as paragons of tolerance and open-mindedness. The Democrats are disorganized and can’t get on message. You also hear the same from conservatives, who often say of ourselves that we don’t fear open debate — we’ve got fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives.
Seriously — stop. If either side were completely right, they’d have serious trouble winning elections because they could never get their people in line. And the notion that the left-blogs harbor open debate is pretty laughable. On what? The Iraq war? Tax cuts? Name a serious policy issue where Kos, Atrios, Hamsher, and Aravosis disagree. As a matter of fact, the left-blogs have largely conceived themselves as an effort to get their party to speak with a single voice on Iraq.
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I find the last comment pretty laughable — “Sometimes I wonder if it will take losing the White House for the Republicans to take the Internet more seriously,” Turk said.”
Well, Turk, can you tell me someone who has WON an election because of the Internet? All this navel-gazing by web folks puts the tool before its purpose. Sure, a lot of money can be raised online and the web lends a lot of legitimacy for the mainstream media who look to it for stories and to try to look hip, but it’s still predominantly in the realm of stuff that’s *neat* — you getting a lot out of Twitter, Patrick? How’s your wiki coming?
Sure, we need to be better at this stuff. And we can’t ignore it because the next ‘direct mail’ or ‘exit poll’ might be sitting right around the corner and we can’t miss it. But we shouldn’t feel bad because the left is ‘better’ at it. This is always what they’ve done best — getting together, making noise, wasting time. These things are today’s versions of sit-ins and protests and bra burning. We never did that stuff either and we came out of it okay.
The key is using all the great tools out there to reinforce the message (and the fundraising) in the most efficient and relevant way. And, although we may be a bit behind, we’re mostly doing pretty well.
Well, Turk, can you tell me someone who has WON an election because of the Internet?
I’m pretty sure George Allen and Conrad Burns would blame the Internet for their loss. And if someone lost because of the Internet, then the converse dictates that someone won because of it.
Allen was up by 16 points before “macaca”. You can argue that his stupid comment, and not the Internet, caused his defeat. That, however, ignores that only a few hundred people would have seen the comment if it hadn’t been for YouTube.
Now, can I point to a single Republican that has won because of it? Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
So, the power of the internet so far isn’t in the money it can raise or the votes it can motivate, but in the guerilla, viral stories (or attacks) it can draw the attention of the mainstream media to. Swift boats were definitely part of that. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. Let’s keep it up!
I see the blogosphere as a tool for getting the information I need about how, where and why to get involved in a productive way.
People who want to make even a tiny impact on the world–to add a relevant piece of information to an argument that supports or undermines its point, to communicate their perspective in a timely way to opinion leaders, including politicians, when they’re considering issues that matter to me:
That’s why I’m online. You can’t make a difference if you’re slow and offline.
That, and I’m addicted.