The Next Right Launches
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 28th, 2008 2:05 pmSince our launch yesterday, I’ve been spending a lot of my time getting The Next Right off the ground. We’re really jazzed about the reaction so far — 9,000 uniques and over 20,000 pageviews on the first alone, and on track for another big day.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be moving most of my political blogging over to the new platform. There will be some tech/personal stuff that pops up here from time to time, but most of my energies on the blogging front will be devoted to The Next Right community.
The easiest way to keep in touch is to subscribe to my RSS feed. Through the magic of Yahoo Pipes, my blogs from The Next Right will show up automagically in the feed along with stuff from here.
I hope all regular readers will join me in making The Next Right a daily pit stop.
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Unifying Narratives Work. Microtrends Fail.
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 22nd, 2008 3:08 pmDavid All argues that the proliferation of competing “agendas” now emanating from individual Republican House members misses the point. I agree, but for very different reasons than David. His essential argument is that Republicans should ditch any hope for a Contract-style agenda:
Gone are the days of Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America, a plan which every Republican got behind and backed. A unified agenda back in 1994 was possible because of Newt Gingrich’s intoxicating personality and strong leadership style; but it was also a different time, a time before the Internet inspired a culture of choice and information.
Today, thanks to the Internet, each Member of Congress can and should be fighting in the trenches for the hundreds of issues which drive their voters to the polls under the banner of the Republican Party. The Internet provides a medium to distribute our message like never before. We can fight on thousands of fronts.
Rather than being forced to to pick a few, limited set of agenda items, House Republicans should change the game and act more like iTunes and NetFlix — offering conservative, libertarian, and independent voters a lot of different choices — all of which can only be found under the larger brand — Republican.
This overlooks the most salient example: Obama, the epitome of the new net-centric candidate. Obama has actually thrived on a very strong, unified message.
Change. Hope.
This is not an agenda. It’s deliberately vague. But the message is as clear and unifying as Reagan’s optimism. Those who celebrate the bottom-up nature of the Obama campaign can’t deny its top-down, cult of personality, aggressive brand management aspects.
I was recently discussing the difference between the Clinton and Obama campaigns with a GOP pollster in town. In the conversation, an interesting point came up: that Obama has beat Clinton because he’s refused the play the small-bore, microtargeting game epitomized by her ex-strategist (and Microtrends author) Mark Penn. Obama has run on a big, national message of generational change in both red and blue states and it’s worked.
Democratic voters have latched on to this narrative. There may not have been a mass market for a 46-year old guy named Barack as President a year ago — but now there is. He created it. That takes a big, aspirational message that’s bigger than the sum total of a bunch of issue positions and demographic segments. The Internet doesn’t change that. It actually amplifies the success of popular messages at the head of the long tail. The common thread of Internet success stories is that they tend to be really big success stories, the enhanced variety offered by the long tail notwithstanding. Think of Google, Apple, and Obama.
What Obama has done for change represents what the Republican Revolutionaries did with the Contract with America. They married the Republican brand to the idea of Reform. Republicans may have won in 1994 without the Contract, but they would have governed a whole lot differently without it. Without a well-branded agenda, they would have more quickly drifted into a boring, piecemeal floor schedule.
The problem with the current “agendas” on offer is that they’re small-bore. They act as though we were still in the majority and our job was to fine-tune the workings of government. It’s not. In the minority, our job is to 1) make the majority’s life miserable, grinding the House and Senate floors to a halt, and building a narrative of the Democrats as broken and incompetent, and 2) offer big, bold alternatives to this mess like the Contract did in 1994.
We’ll be discussing more of what these agenda items might be over at The Next Right, but I imagine it would be things on this scale:
- A total ban on earmarks
- Let the half of Federal workers due to retire in the next few years retire – and don’t replace them
- Personal Social Security accounts
- A 50% cut in farm subsidies (yeah, good luck on that after this week)
- McCain’s idea of
replacingsupplementing the UN with a league of democracies
There’s a market for this kind of change. When Tom Cole posted a few of the incrementalist agenda items to the NRCC blog, I couldn’t count a single positive comment in favor of the nearly 2,000 posted. This shows the disconnect between Washington and the grassroots. Instead of boldness, many members still think a 1998-style litany of “practical solutions” will work for a party that could be headed into the wilderness without a shock to the system.
Like this post? Join us on May 27th as we discuss the future of the Republican Party and more with the launch of The Next Right.
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The Next Right Launches May 27th
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 22nd, 2008 10:21 amWe just sent the following announcement out to The Next Right’s e-mail list:
We’re pleased to announce that The Next Right has a launch date: next Tuesday, May 27th.
Since announcing this project, the response has exceeded our expectations in every way. Some of the savviest analysts we know have already signed on as writers. And over 1,000 of you have signed up to stay informed on latest developments.
If you want The Next Right right now, you don’t have to wait. We’ve already launched an RSS feed with relevant posts from the site’s founding editors, and links to the critical stories we’ll be covering on the site. This feed will remain the same after launch.
http://feeds.feedburner.com /TheNextRight
We’ve also updated our splash site with more information on how YOU can help support the site, with information on how you can be a Next Right writer, advertiser, or help defray our startup costs with a generous contribution.
See you on Tuesday,Soren Dayton, Jon Henke, and Patrick Ruffini
TheNextRight.com
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Beyond Bush
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 16th, 2008 9:44 pmThe hue and cry for the GOP to file for divorce against President Bush is reaching a crescendo with Tom Davis’s acid-tongued barbs and this more gracefully worded column by 2004 Bush campaign advisor Peggy Noonan.
Davis and Noonan mean well, but their proposed strategy amounts to taking the Democrats’ bait. Because whether the GOP decides to run for Bush or against him, the meta-narrative will still be about Bush. Any day people are reminded of the President in a political context, even when our people are throwing him under the bus, is a bad day for Republicans.
President Bush is a lame duck. His term expires in eight months. Politically speaking, John McCain is the leader of the party. Bush’s term will overlap that of the 111th Congress by a whopping 17 days. Why should Republican Congressional candidates take the bait by positioning themselves vis a vis someone who will be a political non-factor once they take office? If they embrace President Bush, it’s political poison. If they make a fuss of distancing themselves, it guarantees headlines with Candidate X and Bush in close proximity, and looks politically motivated. Don’t take the bait.
The challenge for Republicans is not to support Bush or to reject Bush but to transcend Bush. We are quickly nearing the point where the last piece of meaningful legislation will cross this President’s desk. To suggest that Republicans might want to get around to crafting a post-Bush agenda ignores the fact that the post-Bush era is already upon us. It began March 4, when John McCain secured 1,191 delegates. Start acting like it. John McCain is the only national Republican local Republicans should be talking about.
Republican candidates could do well by parrying attempts to tie them to Bush as follows:
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that President Bush sparks strong feelings on both sides. But last I checked, there’s an election coming up soon to replace George Bush. I’m focused on the future, and the next Congress and the next President. There’s only one person in this race who’s fixated on the past and on George Bush and that’s my opponent. I can only assume that’s because he’d love to continue the hyper-partisanship of the last decade. Not me.
With all due respect, my opinion of President Bush matters about as much as my opinion of President Coolidge. They’ll both be in the history books come next January. When I hit the ground running in 2009, I look forward to serving with President McCain to bringing gas prices down and our troops home victorious.
This has the advantage of being intellectually honest. Voters are forward-looking and know that Bush won’t be President soon. In no other election since 2000 could you say this.
By subjecting themselves to a massive internal debate over the President, Republicans would validate the Democratic narrative of this election as a referendum on Bush. Just ask Al Gore how productive meta-debates about the President’s role in his exit year really are. And his boss was at 65%.
Don’t take the bait.
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John McCain: Tolstoy in My Inbox
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 15th, 2008 11:20 pmToday, I sat in on my first McCain blogger conference call and cheered as McCain promised to continue these sessions on a biweekly basis as President. (Contrast with Barack Obama, whose netroots coordinator left in frustration at Obama’s refusal to be similarly accessible.) And this comes on top of weekly press conferences, and submitting to questions in the well of the House a la the British Prime Minister. McCain could become the most transparent and cross-examined President in history.
Online, it seems to be a different story, at least when it comes the image of John McCain as projected on JohnMcCain.com and in the daily emails that go out under his name. Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.
The email the McCain camp sent today illustrates the problem. I’m deliberately zooming out because I don’t want you to focus on the copy:
These are recent emails sent by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
Even from a distance, it’s night and day. You’ve got brevity and short, rapid-fire paragraphs. They feature a clear call to action above the fold. They’re highly readable, or more to the point, scannable – since the average reader online reads no more than 20% of content. They respect today’s attention-deprived user. Less is more.
Most important is what these messages say about the candidate. These messages were crafted solely for the e-mail channel. I don’t know about you, but the e-mails I get everyday from friends and colleagues look a lot more like Hillary and Barack’s e-mails than they do War and Peace. I’ve even entertained the thought of Obama banging out a few pithy sentences on the MacBook Pro in the hotel suite on the way to the victory party (it’s believable enough). I know that he didn’t, but the fact that I’ve wondered counts for something.
McCain’s e-mail start off with the anachronistic “From the Desk of John McCain” — a 1970s-era direct mail device I haven’t seen on a piece of real stationery in a decade. The haughty phrasing is designed to evoke a sense of prestige — the sense that the person addressing you is Big and Important. But the Internet is not about being Big and Important. It’s about being One of Us. Again: fundamental disconnect. McCain offline gets this, shedding the trappings of the Imperial Presidency. McCain online, not so much.
But that concern pales in comparison to the content. Today’s e-mail, in marked contrast to the short, e-mail-like e-mails from Hillary and Barack, is lifted from speech text. In that he spoke the words, it is him. But it’s not him communicating something unique for the online audience. It’s him or his handlers keeping us at a safe distance using the most formal version of McCain possible – again, the polar opposite of what McCain’s offline strategy is about.
The explanation for why this is actually very prosaic: the approval process. In a short-staffed campaign, the easiest — and sometimes the only — option is to lift from already approved text. Nobody has the time to spend up to 24 hours getting all new text approved by McCain or his closest advisers, by which time the window of opportunity may have passed. And McCain’s signature nets more money than Rick Davis’s, no matter how you word the message. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In the moment, it all makes sense. The problem is that over time, you wind up cheapening McCain’s personal brand. Maybe I’m being a Steve Jobs-like pie-in-the-sky perfectionist here, but having to play along with the illusion that John McCain sat down at his desk to deliver us gobs of text is demeaning both to us and to McCain. This is not direct mail. We are not some people data-mined off a consumer list who’ve never heard from you before. We opted-in. We are the top 1% — the savviest, most interested, most influential supporters. We get the joke. On the flip side, consider how much Hillary and Obama get simply by seeming real in their e-mails, even if they don’t get to cram in as many policy points.
This may all seem very esoteric, but it’s important. The pixels you see in the Hillary and Barack e-mails fueled the rise of the biggest people-powered fundraising machine in history. It’s worth studying how they do things at a very minute level.
Improvement starts by smashing the desk — and giving us the real McCain.
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You Lose, You Resign
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 13th, 2008 10:46 pmThere is no sugarcoating tonight’s result in MS-1. Thankfully, the NRCC doesn’t even try, issuing a soberly worded statement from Chairman Tom Cole in lieu of the usual upbeat results memo:
[T]he political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general. Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for. This is something we can do in cooperation with our Presidential nominee, but time is short.
I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election.
The problem with this is that they’re pushing a “change” message with the same faces. The guy at the top of the ticket represents his own kind of change. But if we want 2008 to be more than a “lonely victory” you need a changing of the guard at the leadership and the candidate level.
I’m not going to say that heads roll because of these three elections alone, but if we fail to recapture the House or make surprising headway towards that goal, we need to be pretty firm that the current leadership must resign en masse. Boehner and Blunt have six months to turn this ship around.
In fact, this should become a standing rule: You lose, you resign. We will start winning a lot faster once there are consequences for losing.
That’s how it works in every Parliamentary system. One party loses the election even by a little, and the old guard turns over the keys. It may take two or three tries, but usually this results in leaders who not only talk different but are different. The grassroots needs to work to create this same sort of accountability here. And we need quit outsourcing Congressional elections to the Presidential level, since nationalizing the electon worked real well in MS-1 and LA-6.
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MS-1: Will Nationalizing Obama Work?
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 11th, 2008 10:48 pmAnother too-close-for-comfort special election looms on Tuesday, with Republican Greg Davis in a dogfight with Democrat Travis Childers in MS-1, a Bush 62%, Cook PVI R+10 seat. Childers nearly won an outright majority in first round balloting two weeks ago.
Once again, the strategy of tying Obama to a Democratic Congressional candidate is being tested aggressively, with Childers stirring the pot after denying Obama had endorsed him (when he in fact had).
This was what the NRCC put on the air in LA-6, our last special election defeat:
It’s no wonder Woody Jenkins came up short. This is a conventional cookie cutter ad that could have been run in any of the other 434 districts in any election this past decade. The NRCC claims some credit for tightening the race from the 5-9 point lead Don Cazayoux had a week or so out to three points, but at the House level and with the additional variable of a conservative independent on the ballot, that spread is not too convincing. Obama/taxes was ALL the NRCC ran in LA-6.
The NRCC’s IE unit is doing better work in MS-1, targeting its ads squarely against Childers:
Still, the Obama message is being heard in a big way, with Freedom’s Watch dumping at least $500,000 into anti-Obama spots like this one.
I have to ask: Is this it? Is this the best we can do? Demonizing Nancy Pelosi has worked nowhere because of the Speaker’s milquetoast public persona. Absent some scandal or hugely controversial statement, it’s difficult to nationalize a local race around a party leader. In the wake of Rev. Wright and “bitter,” some are betting Obama can be this lightning rod.
He may well be, but these special elections are the wrong places to test the theory. Special elections are low-turnout affairs dominated by high information voters likely to know a lot about local issues. These are the voters least likely to be swayed by a boilerplate nationalization of the race. This is part of why specials can often diverge so wildly from the partisan trend in a district despite the local majority party’s best efforts. In special elections more than most elections, candidates rise and fall on their own merits.
In the general election, with an extremely high noise level surrounding the Presidential race and Congressional elections an afterthought, Republicans might have better luck with tying red state Democrats to Obama. In November, a smaller percentage of the electorate will be making an independent decision about a local Congressional candidate. For many, their Presidential vote will influence their votes down ballot. This is why we seldom see huge partisan swings at the Congressional level in Presidential election years. Expanding the universe of low-information partisans voting tends to dampen the partisan mood swings we see in midterms. In Presidential election years, districts more easily revert to their partisan norms, normally a good thing in places like LA-6 and MS-1.
Still, we have to do better than the ads Republicans have run in these spring specials, which are so conventional they’ll automatically get tuned out and have zero persuasive impact whatsoever.
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The Left’s Stupid Anti-McCain Messaging
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 9th, 2008 11:41 pmThird Bush Term. The Bush-McCain hug. McSame.
Excuse me while I McYawn.
For all the left has done to move bodies and build infrastructure, there’s one area in which they remain woefully lacking: message. Nowhere is this more apparent in their central charge against McCain: that he’s a Bush clone from top to bottom. From the Obama campaign, to the DNC, to 527s and c4s like David Brock’s Progressive Media USA, you’ll see this repeated over and over.
With President Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, and I think I’m being charitable here, it’s easy to see the Democrats as picking off low hanging fruit. They’ve been Bush haters for this long, so why give up now? And why resist the temptation to hang the Bush albatross around the GOP’s neck, which would seem to be their trump card in another down year for Republicans?
The problem is that it runs counter to some deeply ingrained perceptions about McCain, the most transparently un-Bush candidate Republicans could have nominated. How does one overlook the fact that amongst Republican primary voters most dissatisfied with Bush, McCain dominated. Or McCain’s bitter rivalry with the President that lingered long beyond the 2000 election, culminating in charges that he threatened to leave the party, and now, that he didn’t even vote for President Bush in 2000? How does Arianna’s story square with the narrative of “McSame?”
The Democrats have chosen to run the same campaign against McCain as they would have run against Romney or Huckabee. This will turn out to be a strategic mistake.
Why? Because they ignore the new media reality that no amount of points on television can overturn a narrative backed up by the free media. The left’s “McSame” campaign is an example of the particularly crude communications tactic of countermessaging. Countermessaging consists solely of challenging a prevailing public narrative. The media is not liberal. There was no housing bubble. Global warming is a myth.
This tactic can be useful practiced by notoriously off-message B- and C-teamers running interference while, well behind the line of scrimmage, the quarterback prepares to throw long. The problem is that this particularly uninventive form of McCain Maverick Denial is the Democrats’ central strategy for discrediting the Republican nominee. Few people who aren’t partisan Democrats actually believe it. If you were to ask undecideds about McCain’s comparative weaknesses, I’m not sure Bush-coziness would be close to the top of the list in the same way it would be for a more conventional Republican.
If we are in an era of authenticity, where free media narratives reign, then you’re limited to arguing based on a candidate’s actual weaknesses and strengths. In a few cases, you can create weaknesses if you’re operating in an evergreen space where there are no public perceptions yet either way. Unfortunately for David Brock et al. Bush-McCain tensions have been a recurring theme in our collective political psyche for nearly a decade.
If the left were actually smart, what would they do to us?
- Drive wedges between McCain and his base by playing up McCain’s ongoing feuds with Bush and the conservative movement, demoralizing conservatives and keeping base turnout closer to 1996-2000 levels as opposed to red-hot 2004 levels. Focus on insider issues like the 2000 vote that won’t get much play outside the respective party echo chambers, limiting any fallout among true independents, who are a dwindling percentage of the electorate anyway. Remember that it’s easier to get 4 million conservatives not to show up than it is to get 2 million independents to switch.
- Portray McCain as the “fake Democrat” and Obama as the “real Democrat.”
- Limit Bush=McCain criticisms to Iraq only, where there is already an established public narrative of McCain being very hawkish, and in fact, leading Bush into the surge. And isn’t Iraq the core of their indictment? Why muddy it up with domestic stuff where Bush and McCain are often night and day?
- If you are going to focus on Bush-McCain similarities, always juxtapose with McCain’s past Bush opposition to make him appear inconsistent. But publicly recognize that Bush and McCain were once opposed, so you don’t take the credibility hit you would from straight-up McCain Maverick Denial.
Will they pick up on this? Doubtful. To do so would mean to concede some Republican talking points to make even more devastating anti-McCain arguments, something those like Brock who are accountable to the netroots must never do. And countermessaging is too central to what Brock does as the head of Media Matters advancing liberal media bias denial.
In many ways, the Bush 2004 definition of Kerry provides a useful contrast. It was a textbook example of a more nuanced message offensive that the base wouldn’t have chosen. It would have been easy to run a classic Kerry as Massachusetts liberal campaign. Instead, they tagged Kerry as a flip-flopper, with the goal of maximizing contrasts with a decisive wartime President. In that year, juxtaposition and the perception of incoherence mattered more than one’s current or past positioning.
And isn’t Hillary Clinton the ultimate example of one’s relationship to a President not counting for squat in a real-world election?
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Introducing The Next Right
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 7th, 2008 2:35 pm
Today, we’re giving a sneak peek into something new on the right side of the blogosphere: an online community for change-minded activists and hardcore political junkies in the conservative movement. We’re calling it The Next Right. We’ll be launching in a few weeks, and you can sign up to get an email when we do.
My partners in this endeavor are already well known to you if you’re a fan of savvy, fact-driven political blogging: Jon Henke of QandO and recently a consultant to the Fred Thompson campaign, and Soren Dayton of RedState and Eye on ‘08 fame and all too briefly of the McCain campaign.
Here’s why we’re doing this, and here’s why it’s different.
It’s no secret that the right operates at a severe disadvantage to the left when it comes to building online political infrastructure. People point to ActBlue and Obama’s massive fundraising advantage, but the problem cuts deeper: netroots activists on the left have built critical mass around an idea that regular people on the Internet can get their hands dirty and remix Democratic politics. They not only raise money. They recruit candidates. They fund full-time investigative journalism to ambush Republicans. They act as a party whip, creating consequences for Democrats who, in their view, don’t act like Democrats. They volunteer and flock to states with key races. The right can build all the tools it wants, but without a narrative and a rallying point for action, it will be for naught.
Part of the problem is structural. When the conservative blogosphere first emerged, we were in the midst of a political upswing, with back-to-back-to-back victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Political activism wasn’t going to be a comparative advantage for the right online. Most were content just being pundits or media critics. This trend was reinforced by the blogosphere’s success in scalping Dan Rather, part of a series of new media-driven events that arguably changed the trajectory of the 2004 election.
Ever since then, a radically different set of circumstances has dominated our politics. It’s one that requires a substantially different response — one that requires us to stop being pundits and start being change agents.
Put simply, the party, and in many cases, the movement, has lost its moorings. Earmarks exploded ten-fold, and it wasn’t under a Democratic Congress. In this winter’s primary, we saw the once mighty fiscal-social-national conservative coalition turned in on itself, with economic conservatives pitted against social conservatives. And too many of the “experts” in the Presidential campaigns this cycle failed to modernize the way the party does business, clinging to the old top-down rostrums of direct mail and fundraising-by-cocktail-party in an increasingly networked and crowdsourced world.
It’s no wonder that Joe Conservative outside the Beltway feels that none of his self appointed “leaders” are listening to him. He looks to Washington and sees a leadership class that is too often arrogant, timid, divided, and technologically behind the curve. It’s no wonder why this year more than most his wallet has been sealed shut when it comes to supporting Republican candidates — even the good ones.
We’re calling the site The Next Right because much of this story will be written in the future tense. Our analysis will be as much about looking ten and fifteen years down the road as it will be about dissecting the mechanics of the 2008 contest. What are the coalitions, strategies, and tactics the right needs to win again? How does the party need to change to attract a generation of voters who could very well be lost to us if we don’t move fast? Where do we find the candidates who will lead a resurgent right in the 2010 and 2012 elections and beyond? The vibrant discussion Soren, Jon, and many others had about the future of the movement last spring and summer would be perfect fodder for this new venture.
If you’re looking for pure-play opinion and link bait on sundry topics from Ann Coulter to Jimmy Carter/Hamas, you won’t find it here. What you will find is in-depth (often unabashedly technical) writing about the election, the polls, the strategy, and the issues. Our analysis will track truth and stay true to the numbers. But it will self-consciously serve a greater purpose — educating YOU to be your own political strategist and start doing something — whether that’s blogging about your local Congressional race or Democratic corruption in your state, organizing fundraising drives, and maybe even managing races or running for office yourself. Only a revival of civic engagement at the grassroots level will create a conservative future we want: one that is pork-free and robust in the defense of our country and its values. We can’t call a switchboard and wait for Washington to fix the mess. We have to do it ourselves, from the ground up, in every state.
In that spirit, we’re opening the doors to anyone who wants to blog on The Next Right. Users will be able to create their own blogs on the site, an ability only a handful of conservative sites offer today. We’re also looking for a great stable of front-page writers who can write smart, savvy analysis on a consistent basis — email us if you think you fit the bill. We want to open this up as much as possible. It can’t just be about the three of us, or it will fail.
I’m pumped about this new venture. The last few months have seen a considerable amount of backchannel discussion between the thought leaders about the sorry state of online activism on the right — often with great agreement on a direction moving forward. The good news is that the talent is there. I’ve long relied on Soren and Jon for high-level political analysis, and by bringing it under one roof and opening the door to more people, we hope this quickly becomes a hub right-leaning junkies like you.
We don’t think this alone will solve the activism gap. Anyone who tells you that they alone have the answer is fooling you. This is not “the Daily Kos of the right.” What we’re hoping to do is create momentum and an intellectual framework for action — because action ultimately starts with narratives and ideas. We want grassroots conservatives and libertarians to start believing that they can make a difference again — a sense all too many have lost. Only you – and not some well-funded 527 — can bring the movement into the future. Only when grassroots conservative have a direct stake in the future of the party are we effective. The Next Right is about creating a vision for a 21st century Republican Party and conservative movement.
On a personal note, you should finally see me blogging more, though not at PatrickRuffini.com. I’ve committed to moving all my purely political content to The Next Right, and will be setting up my RSS feed to automagically redirect you to my writings there. I’ll still keep some personal and tech stuff here, but most of my stuff will be there.
We hope you’ll join us in taking the next right.
