A Response to Dean Barnett
by Patrick Ruffini :: September 27th, 2007 11:06 pm What, you didn’t think I would stay out of this, did you? As tiresome, grating Action Alert Guy, how could I?
I get that online activism is not the kind of thing that’ll get everyone’s skirt up. But taken to its logical conclusion, the view that “it’s all about punditry” is just as short sighted as Kos’s whining, thought-free winnerism.
Dean’s right that it is about ideas. Ideas are the foundation of everything we do in politics — the door knocking, the envelope stuffing, the donating. But punditry is increasingly divorced from actual ideas.
How many blog posts do you see with a bright new idea for dealing with Iran, or solving Social Security? Such posts are few and far between because the people who have time to think them up are few and far between. So instead, what we mostly have is clever, witty commentary on the history others are busy making. If that’s what punditry is, count me out. There are probably thousands of other bloggers who could turn a phrase better than I can on the Petraeus Report. It’s just not my thing. I don’t want to spend my time being the 6,297th voice in a giant echo chamber.
That’s what 99% of punditing has become — but it’s the other 1% that really interests me.
Take a look at Dean’s example of the supremacy of punditry. It was an intellectual at AEI who first proposed the surge. Stop right there. That’s as far away from the pundits bloviating on the Sunday Shows as you can get. Frederick Kagan wasn’t regurgitating second-hand information. He was proposing an original idea, one powerful enough to get picked up on by the White House.
In my book, pushing an idea from concept to execution is not punditry. It is activism. In another realm, doesn’t the term “judicial activism” connote the idea that one need not look up from a law book or leave chambers to be an activist?
You do not need to give money or trudge through Iowa to be an activist. All you have to do is propose an original idea and own it like a dog with a bone. You can do that that through writing alone if the idea is important enough.
I try to only blog when I have something original to say, whether it looks outwardly like I’m being a “pundit” or an “activist.” The state-of-the-movement discussion we were having this summer is a perfect example. That conversation was not an act of punditry, but of activism, and of trying to generate the intellectual capital necessary to move the party in the right direction in time for 2008. It was commentary not for its own sake, but to achieve certain definable objectives.
Even in my ideal world, blogs will do commentary the vast majority of the time. What concerns me is that we don’t always properly appreciate the implications of what that writing can accomplish. Do you understand what TPM Muckraker did with its team of reporters to seed the narrative of a corrupt GOP in the last election? Or (as Jon Henke can sing chapter and verse on) what they did in conjunction with that famous New Republic piece to create a narrative of George Allen as racially insensitive, without which “macaca” may never have taken hold? Poring through FEC reports and doing original reporting is something we simply don’t do enough of. Call it boring activism if you must, but looking at the Left’s dominance of original reporting, the Internet creates an opportunity for conservatives to level the playing field.
And what about straight activism? Is Dean actually implying someone should never bother to contribute under $100 to a campaign (psst… at the evil, top-down RNC, where I used to work, that’s where we got most of our money)? Or that one shouldn’t bother to volunteer? Yes — a few exceptional bloggers will always have the greatest impact with their words, particularly when they can inject new ideas rather than rehash the day’s news. But what about busy readers who don’t have time to blog themselves? Can’t they make their impact by making a quick donation or calling their Congressman?
The bottom line is this. I’m concerned about the message we’re broadcasting to everyone in our movement when we suggest that activism is somehow unworthy of us. The Goldwater-Reagan Revolution would not have been possible with that mentality. Some have the luxury of being pundits exclusively, but most people will make their impact through activism of one form or another.
In cases like MA-5, the contrast is even more pronounced. All the commentary in the world will not elect someone like Jim Ogonowski, because no matter compelling the words are, fewer than 1 in 435 readers will be in a position to act on the message with their votes. But contributions, on the other hand, are convertible into hard assets that matter in the district. And by creating a narrative about why this race matters, we can exercise a disproportionate impact on a race that could have a disproportionate impact in damaging the Democrat-controlled Congress. I’m hopeful that we did more than just raise $15,000. By creating enough of a buzz, who’s to say we didn’t signal some big donors to jump in too? Only 7 new maxed-out donors and we’ve doubled our money. It’s all about knowing what buttons to push and picking the right battles.
At the Presidential level, things are actually worse than Dean imagines. Yes, the blogosphere is spread too thin to be able to make much difference activism-wise at the Presidential level. The blogosphere actually had relatively little to do with Howard Dean, or Jim Webb, or Barack Obama, or (arguably) with Ron Paul. Heroic efforts like MyManMitt’s still remain the exception.
But don’t underestimate the millions — yes millions — of activists who will be inspired to give money next year. And the fact that Democrats have figured out how to create a huge markets for online fundraising and actually raise anywhere from a third to half of their money through the medium should scare us. This is about more than Kos — he can only move coin in the low seven figures. I’m talking about the eight and possibly nine figures that the broader Democrat activist space can produce because their leaders have been strategic in fully embracing the medium and doing the important things online.
The bottom line is that now is not the time to be risk averse. Now is not to be time to circumscribe activism. Not with the country at risk of complete Democrat control.
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Great post, as usual. Picking individual races and continuously following both the R and D can help change a narrative. MA-05 is a decent example. I hope some of the major R blogs will adopt one or two House races and really put them on the map in 2008. But I’m afraid too many people want to argue about the Presidential primary and thus the lower races fall through the proverbial cracks.
I noticed you have nothing…absolutely nothing about Ron Paul. Are you some kind of idiot? Do you even know who he is or what he stands for? He is running for president you know, and is about restoring the constitution instead of dismantling it. But go ahead, make Adolf Guliani look like a saint, when he is just another G.W. BU(ll)SH(it). Learn2politic
You must be an idiot! I went to a Ron Paul rally recently. As Ron was leaving, the crowds almost crushed him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind Ron and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
“Who touched me?” Ron asked.
When they all denied it, Kent Snyder said, “Ron, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”
But Ron said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”
This shows that Ron Paul is the best candidate for US President!
First of all, I have to challenge the claim that Frederick Kagan’s idea was so original and creative. All he suggested was that we should try to defeat the insurgency by employing standard, military-doctrine counter-insurgency tactics. So why weren’t we doing this all along? Simple. We didn’t have enough men. Military doctrine says that for a country the size of Iraq you would need 500,000 - 700,000 men, and Gen. Casey only had 130,000.
But Kagan pointed out that with 350,000 new trainees from the Iraqi Security Force and plan to implement a surge in Baghdad anyway, (Even the Iraq Study Group plan urged this) the additional 30,000 troops that you would need could be used to implement a full counter-insurgency strategy nation-wide. This is hardly very original. It’s just a matter of doing the math.
Of course, this isn’t going to work. The QUALITY of the ISF force is simply too low. They are too heavily infiltrated with Shiite militia which may be why the military higher-ups never bothered to suggest it.
What was crucial here was that Kagan had connections through the American Enterprise Institute which I suspect was more important than the internet in this process. But the other point about the plan is that it is EXACTLY what George Bush wanted to hear.
But as far as the larger issue is concerned, I don’t see the point about it being all about punditry. Just because Howard Dean didn’t win doesn’t mean that internet fund-raising wasn’t pretty crucial to his campaign. It wasn’t the internet that made Howard Dean look so angry.
And I think that Ron Paul’s internet support has been almost altogether positive. Without it, nobody would be talking about Ron Paul at all. It isn’t the internet supporter’s fault that Ron Paul chose to spend so little money and so little time in Iowa. What if Paul had finished second in the Iowa Straw Poll instead of Huckabee? It would immediately have been seen by the media as a repudiation of the Iraq War by a significant portion of the Republican electorate and would have boosted Ron Paul’s campaign much higher, I believe, than it did Huckabee’s.
So just because a candidate with good internet support blunders in some other area, doesn’t mean that his internet support was of no value.
[…] Punditry versus activism; False dichotomy? digg_url = ‘http://www.eyeon08.com/2007/09/29/punditry-versus-activism-false-dichotomy/’; digg_title = ‘Punditry versus activism; False dichotomy?’; digg_bodytext = ‘Patrick Ruffini, former E-campaign director for the RNC, and Dean Barnett, former driver for Mitt Romney in his 1994 Senate campaign, are debating the relative merits of activism (Ruffini, an activism activist, here and here) and punditry (Barnett, a punditry activist, here and here). I basically agree with Patrick, as my framing should indicate, but […]’; digg_skin = “compact”; digg_topic = “politics”; ( function() { var ds=typeof digg_skin==’string’?digg_skin:'’; var h=80; var w=52; if(ds==’compact’) { h=18; w=120; } var u=typeof digg_url==’string’?digg_url:(typeof DIGG_URL==’string’?DIGG_URL:window.location.href); document.write(”"); } )() Patrick Ruffini, former E-campaign director for the RNC, and Dean Barnett, former driver for Mitt Romney in his 1994 Senate campaign, are debating the relative merits of activism (Ruffini, an activism activist, here and here) and punditry (Barnett, a punditry activist, here and here). I basically agree with Patrick, as my framing should indicate, but I think that is mostly because Barnett doesn’t understand what he is doing. […]
[…] Patrick Ruffini, former E-campaign director for the RNC, and Dean Barnett, former driver for Mitt Romney in his 1994 Senate campaign, are debating the relative merits of activism (Ruffini, an activism activist, here and here) and punditry (Barnett, a punditry activist, here and here). I basically agree with Patrick, as my framing should indicate, but I think that is mostly because Barnett doesn’t understand what he is doing. […]