Barack Obama

Jose Antonio Vargas breaks down some monumental numbers.

13 million e-mail addresses. 

$500 million raised online.

6.5 million donations from 3 million donors with an average donation of $80.

3.2 million Facebook friends (to John McCain's 600,000).

2 million My.BarackObama.com profiles created.

One million participants in Obama's cell phone text messaging program -- this is less than the 6-8 million rumored but still massive.

400,000 volunteer blog posts written. 200,000 volunteer events created. 35,000 local and affinity groups created by supporters.

Three million volunteer phone calls made in the last four days of the election through the website without supporters having to step into a campaign headquarters.

The campaign had a full time chief technology officer in addition to a new media director. They had a full time analytics team whose job was to do nothing else but monitor site data.

What's with this G20 summit last weekend in Washington? Who are the G20? The MSM as usual abdicated their duty - did what they do best: what they cannot spin or obfuscate, they bury.

Initial research learns that the G20 have emerged from the the Doha Trade Round, set up on the basis of a Brazilian initiative in the run-up to the Cancun Conference. Apart of the states making up the G8, G20 member states include Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the EU and European Central Bank, and the NGOs IMF, the World Bank and their Development Committee.

With the notable exception of South Korea neither of these countries has a principled tradition of free market capitalism. All, until recently suffered, or are still bowing under the rule of theocrats, autocrats, dictators, a collective, or all of the above.

The Third World is slowly crawling on to the world stage, out of its largely self-imposed, poverty ridden, Marxism or theocracy driven lethargy. But swathes of Latin America are already in danger of regressing back into darkness, even before having fully emerged from it; Socialist as well as Islamic beginnings are simply antithetical to individual rights, the moral requirement for a fully functioning free-market democracy.

And then there's good, old chauvinist commie prop. The Heritage Foundation here reports on the PR stunt China pulled just ahead of the summit!

What can be expected of such a global, economic governing body? They cannot even be trusted to handle a trade round, let alone lead, run and reform the world's economic and financial system. How would they do that ... by committee, by revelation, or by decree?!

The situation is hardly better in the state of Europe, which is steadily desolving into a post-democratic, Hegelian Absolute. European states are challenging American leadership of the global economy, calling on President-Elect Obama to embrace Europe as America’s equal partner.

Soeren Kern on The Brussels Journal had this to say last week: "The idea behind this new man-to-man relationship with Washington was hatched by (surprise, surprise) France, which currently holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner says the reason for establishing an equal transatlantic partnership is that “the world has changed.” Europe has suddenly realized that the United States “is not the only one concerned by the world’s problems. The European Union has become more resolute…. We don’t want to play a secondary role any more,” says Kouchner," who is an experienced NGO builder (founder Doctors Without Borders).

On the economy the French - as most Europeans - can be fully trusted to commit a coup of state against the private sector. Soeren Kern: "Self-regulation to solve all problems, it’s finished,” Sarkozy says. “Laissez-faire, it’s finished. The all-powerful market that is always right, it’s finished…. It is necessary then for the state to intervene.”

John Gizzi on Human Events goes as far as saying the G20 meeting was in effect Sarkozy's summit, clarifying "that the goal of the French President, was future international economic summits that include many more nations beside the traditional G8 industrial titans. His secondary goal was to assimilate discretionary bondholders (countries that hold U.S. debt) into the summits (...)

John Gizzi

gives us the gist of what emerged from the summit: "(...) Sarkozy did get this long-stated desire of a "college of supervisors" for oversight of the books of major financial institutions operating across international borders. Moreover, the world leaders agreed that their systems would submit to periodic review by the International Monetary Fund (whose Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former French finance minister who was tapped for the IMF position by—you guessed it!—Nicolas Sarkozy).

A tougher line by ratings agencies on exhorbitant compensation for executives–either voluntary or regulatory—was called for in the final communiqué of the G20. Again, this was an issue doggedly pursued by Sarkozy.

With much of the actual work of the summit done behind closed doors, the media has had to rely on reports from anonymous sources on who said what to whom. Relying on such sources, the Washington Post pointed to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as one who was particularly opposed to Sarkozy’s calls for greater global regulation over markets in sovereign nations.

We are looking at an entire round of talks stretching well into the next year. Apart from the above, nothing much emerged from present summit while outgoing President Bush acted as a forceful buffer against the anti capitalist onslaught. But as postmodern President-Elect Obama joins the company of Argentina, China and the other card-carrying members of the Grizzly 20 collective, we will soon all be reminded of which cloth that philosophy is a cut.

Related: - "Hurray! It's the Weekend of Capitalism!"-

When Americans voted for "hope" and "change" I doubt many thought they were voting for a trip down memory lane. But in recent days it's abundantly clear the Obama administration is simply going to be an employment agency for Clinton alumni and in economic policy, seeks to turn the clock back almost 80 years.

Time magazine advocates a "New New Deal"  http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1856381_1856380,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily  for the new President.

Republicans should judiciously---but vocally--oppose the effort.

Michael Barone outlines in specifics what was wrong with the first New Deal. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/obamas_new_new_deal_no_better.html. The bottom line is that while massive government spending and regulation may have arrested the slide in the economy, they did nothing to build a foundation for long term private sector economy growth.

The bigger problem with a "new New Deal" is the concept of the New Deal made sense for a 1930's economy and society. FDR's America was comprised mostly of laborers and farmers, and had comparatively little trade with foreign nations.  Credit and demand had dried up, and abject poverty was manifest.

Trying to force a command economy on a 21st Century skilled wired workforce in the age of globalization would be like trying to play an MP3 file on a Vitrola. Americans have become accustomed to making their own breaks, and are unlikely to stand aside and wait for the slow moving hand of government to make them for them.   Even the definition of an economic nuclear winter circa 2009 doesn;t seem all that dire http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/depression_2009_what_would_it_look_like/?page=full; in fact, it sounds a lot like middle class life in the late 1970's.......home cooked meals, relatives living upstairs, and watchng lots of TV.

The new President says that right now "we should'nt worry about the deficit" http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOl_Qn1.A4Dw&refer=worldwide 

For Wicca's sake, with the huge Democrat majority in Congress this makes as much sense as making Eliot Spitzer a sorority chaperone.  Every useless, self-serving special interest project known to mankind is going to be funded in 2009 and 2010.

And the Republican Party has best not put its fingerprints on any of it.

We should let the Democratic party fire up the DeLorean and go "Back to the Future" of runway deficit spending  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future

The Republican Party must focus on creating a new , fiscally responsible future based on sustainable budgets, incentives for businesses to grow here in America, an energy policy based on delivering reliable domestic energy to consumers; not appeasing theorists, and yes, building infrastructure based on long term domestic requirements, not wasting captital on short term political agendas.

The 2012 campaign may prove to be the "Battle of the Titans"  Let Barack Obama emulate Franklin Roosevelt. Now we get to fill the void of Ronald Reagan

This weekend, I heard a presentation from a Republican operative and strategist who claimed that to be competitive in the 2012 Presidential race, the GOP candidate will need to raise $1 billion. I suspect that that number is a touch high, but it is not an unreasonable assumption. Let's run some numbers on that.

If you assume that the donors all came from maxed out donors and that the new limit is $2,500, that would mean that the candidate would need to find 200,000 donors. More likely, the average donation size would be much smaller and the number of donors much larger. Barack Obama had over 3.1 million donors by October, averaging about $200/donor.

Consultants, who get paid by campaigns, tend to focus on the dollars. But that's not what we should be focusing on when we look at the Obama campaign. We should be looking at the numbers of bodies. It is the size and scope of Obama's grassroots organization that is really the phenomonal innovation that could transform our politics. That, not the money, is what we need to figure out how to match.

Let's put it slightly differently. Obama got about 3m donors. He got about 6m cell phone numbers. And about 10m on his email list. Turning that around, about 1 in 3 of the people who signed up to his email list gave him money. That's earth-shattering.

I wrote a piece for Pajama's Media on technology in the 2008 race. The key point about the campaign was its decision to put the organizational focus on its grassroots:

In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”...

You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.

In the end, either Obama's organization will be a one-off, which I wouldn't count on, or conservatives and/or Republicans are going to have to learn to match that level of organizing. But just as Obama's organization has partially transformed the Democratic Party and Dean's organization definititely did, the Republican Party will probably be transformed by a shift to a focus on grassroots. Some thoughts on how:

1. The power of the donor class will be signficantly reduced as it shifts to the grassroots.
2. This party would likely involve an overthrow of the current party leadership. And I don't necessarily mean at the RNC, but down at the county party level.
3. A party with that level of grassroots activity and energy might be more ideologically broadly-based than our current party.

That would be a fundamentally different Republican Party, and one that is focused on the voters and the activists and the donors rather than the intrigue of Washington, which has been so much the focus of the party.

The third point about a somewhat different ideological composition could be important, and the Republican primary might even provide a guide. John McCain won his primary based on winning rank-and-file Republicans who were not part of the party apparatus. He campaigned to these people. In March of 2007, I was in New Hampshire on the Straight Talk Express, and McCain was speaking at veterans halls to whoever would come. Mitt Romney was speaking that same day to Lincoln Day dinners. McCain probably wasn't even invited to those dinners.

At the same time, at some state and local conventions the local parties only maintained control under the attack by Ron Paul supporters by cheating them out of their delegate spots. A more vibrant party could have handled -- and perhaps beaten -- new entrants into the process. A more vibrant party could have built a coalition with those people rather than driven them away. Healthy political parties add people because they help them win. Unhealthy ones drive people away.

So in the end, I am somewhat bored with an ideological debate about the future of the party. The real change will be if people are willing to empower a new grassroots of this party and give up power to it. If we don't it's over. If we do, there could be tremendous opportunities that start to address some of the weaknesses of our party.

As we debate how to rebuild our party with new technology and stronger grassroots, watch for the media to fawn all over Obama's use of the Internet as President as he brings (some) of the tactics of his winning campaign to the White House.

It began this weekend with the release of President-elect Obama's YouTube address and the transformation of the anachronistic radio address. This generated an explosion of media interest, even though 1) the format is not especially compelling, and 2) at least initially, ratings and comments on the video have been turned off, preventing ordinary Americans from talking back -- contrary to what happened on My.BarackObama.com during the campaign.

Jonathan Klinger has written about what happens when the bottom-up culture of the campaign meets the top-down culture of government. Still, assuming Obama is able to overcome legal hangups about comments on the White House website and YouTube channel -- as HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt and Blogger Bob of the TSA have on their government-hosted blogs -- we can expect to see unprecedented innovation (a.k.a. stuff that's now standard campaign fare but totally unknown to government).

Here's what I think we can expect from the new WhiteHouse.gov. The media will fall all over themselves when these happen even though they are nothing new if you've been watching Obama's new media efforts during the campaign. Be on the lookout for:

• A blog with comments on WhiteHouse.gov.
• A greater emphasis on e-mail collection and frequent campaign-style advocacy e-mails from figures ranging from Rahm Emanuel and the President himself. The DNC or Obama for America 2 will have THE LIST, but I predict an independent effort to create a millions-strong list inside the White House (with a splash page not out of the question). Remember: official sites get FAR more traffic than campaign sites, so the ability to collect 10,000 or more e-mail addresses a day is not to be overlooked if they put sound conversion-maximizing practices in place.
• "A day in the life of the President" YouTube documentary series. This will get more views than a comparable NBC special if it's any good.
• Using UStream to live-stream ALL the President's or the White House's public events. The campaign saw that when they posted several minutes of original content daily on their YouTube channel, people watched. The White House will have hours of such material AND the bully pulpit.
• A White House Twitter account with the occasional original tweet and @ reply. The Bush team deserves credit for jumping on Twitter long before it hit critical mass, although its tweets are limited to a Twitterfeed of the White House website. Check out 10 Downing Street's Twitter feed for an indicator of what's coming. 
• The White House will experiment with user-generated policy recommendations, akin to Dell's IdeaStorm or the petitions feature on the Number 10 site, where citizens can create their own petitions and collect signatures right on the site. 

Going in to the first year of his Presidency is something that any President needs to handle delicately. Jimmy Carter failed to do it, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did it almost flawlessly, and Bill Clinton went with the flow of Congress and it cost Congress. For all the things that the United States is facing in economic policy, foreign policy, and cultural divisions, President-elect Barack Obama needs to act as if he is walking on eggshells. If not, the first year could take away his aura of almost messianic appeal. 

Say what you will, call him names! A lame duck, yes mistakes have been made, the rules of laissez-faire capitalism were violated, but right now it is he who stands between prosperity through free market principles, and the forces of Statism, who wish to reduce the financial sector to a tragic shadow of its former self, a mere government utility!

Here are two opinions: one by the most underestimated US President in history, George W. Bush - and an article by Objectivists Yaron Brook and Don Watkins on the Op-Ed page of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: a urgent plea for the separation of Economy and State. Europeans are urged to take note of a field virtually unknown to them. But first, the news:

CNN: "Bush ready to defend free-market principles during summit" (...) President Bush signaled that he's ready to defend Western-style capitalism and free-market principles during what will be one of his last appearances on the world stage. (...) As leaders of the world's 20 largest economies, dubbed the G-20, gather in Washington, some European leaders are pushing for global financial regulation. (...) >>>

Wall Street Journal: "The Surest Path Back to Prosperity - 'If you seek economic growth, social justice and human dignity, the free-market system is the way to go'," by George W. Bush As we have seen in recent months, financial turmoil anywhere in the world affects economies everywhere in the world. And so this weekend I'm going to host a Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy with leaders from developed and developing nations that account for nearly 90% of the world economy. The leaders attending this weekend's meeting agree on a clear purpose -- to address the current crisis, and to lay the foundation for reforms that will help prevent a similar crisis in the future. (...) the actions taken by the U.S. and other nations are having an impact. Credit markets are beginning to thaw. Businesses are gaining access to essential short-term financing. A measure of stability is returning to financial systems.

(...) we must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all. For example, some blame the crisis on insufficient regulation of the American mortgage market. But many European countries had much more extensive regulations, and still experienced problems almost identical to our own. History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, it is too much government involvement in the market.

We saw this in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because these firms were chartered by the U.S. Congress, many believed they were backed by the full faith and credit of the U. S. government. Investors put huge amounts of money into Fannie and Freddie, which they used to build up irresponsibly large portfolios of mortgage-backed securities. When the housing market declined, these securities, of course, plummeted in value. It took a taxpayer-funded rescue to keep Fannie and Freddie from collapsing in a way that would have devastated the global financial system.

There is a clear lesson: Our aim should not be more government -- it should be smarter government. All this leads to the most important principle that should guide our work: While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today's problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.

In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right equate the free-enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure. It's true this crisis included failures -- by lenders and borrowers and financial firms, and by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free-market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems, make reforms, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people all across the globe. (...)

Nations that pursued other models have experienced devastating results. Soviet communism starved millions, bankrupted an empire, and collapsed as decisively as the Berlin Wall. Cuba, once known for its vast fields of cane, is now forced to ration sugar. While Iran sits atop giant oil reserves, its people cannot put enough gasoline in their cars.

The record is unmistakable: If you seek economic growth, social justice and human dignity, the free-market system is the way to go. It would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success. (...) >>> Give Bush a buzz z

- Caption: "The Anchorage" by Bryan Larsen -

Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: "Stop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures", by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

Speaking of the financial crisis, French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently said, “Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.” Sarkozy was echoing the views of many, including president-elect Obama, who assume that the financial crisis was caused by free markets--by “unbridled greed” unleashed by decades of deregulation and a “hands off” approach to the economy. And given this premise, the solution, they say, is obvious. To solve this crisis and prevent another one, we need a heavy dose of Uncle Sam’s elixir: government intervention. (...)

But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism. (...) Take a step back.

In the lead up to the “Reagan Revolution,” the explosive growth of government during the ’60s and ’70s had left the American economy in disarray. A crushing tax burden, runaway inflation, brutal unemployment, and economic stagnation had Americans looking for an alternative. That’s what Reagan offered, denouncing big government and promising a new “morning in America.” (...) Bush Jr., often laughably called a champion of free markets, presided over massive new governmental controls like Sarbanes-Oxley and massive new welfare programs like the prescription drug benefit.

None of this is consistent with capitalism. (...) The government’s job under capitalism is single but crucial: to protect individual rights from violation by force or fraud. America came closest to this system in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The result was an unprecedented explosion of wealth creation and consequent rise in the standard of living. Even now, when the fading remnants of capitalism are badly crippled by endless controls, we see that the freest countries--those which retain the most capitalist elements--have the highest standard of living.

Why then should capitalism take the blame today--when capitalism doesn’t even exist? (...) Consider the current crisis (...) the driving force is clearly government intervention: the Fed keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation, thus encouraging people to borrow and providing the impetus for a housing bubble; the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to lend money to low-income and poor-credit households; the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with government-guaranteed debt leading to artificially low mortgage rates and the illusion that the financial instruments created by bundling them are low risk; government-licensed rating agencies, which gave AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, creating a false sense of confidence; deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, whose bailout promises have created huge distortions in incentives and risk-taking throughout the financial system; and so on. In the face of this long list, who can say with a straight face that the housing and financial markets were frontiers of “cowboy capitalism”? (...)

This is just the latest example of a pattern that has been going on since the rise of capitalism: capitalism is blamed for the ills of government intervention--and then even more government intervention is proposed as the cure. The Great Depression? Despite massive evidence that the Federal Reserve’s and other government policies were responsible for the crash and the inability of the economy to recover, it was laissez-faire that was blamed. Consequently, in the aftermath, the government’s power over the economy was not curtailed but dramatically expanded. Or what about the energy crisis of the 1970s? (...)It’s time to stop blaming capitalism for the sins of government intervention, and give true laissez-faire a chance. Now that would be a change we could believe in. >>>

Wall Street Journal have a touching short documentary on the Great Depression up on their video archive ...

Art in this post by the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery for Romantic Realism

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.com.

A few hours ago, I received an e-mail from a Ron Paul supporter, and although the majority of the e-mail was rather condescending, the author makes an important statement that I do believe merits exploration:

You guys [at NextGenGOP] are … ignoring Ron Paul … and his contribution to gathering sincere and dedicated enthusiasm in American politics.

Indeed, the author is correct – our contributors have not really discussed the Ron Paul Revolution, despite the fact that there are a number of crucial lessons for the Republican Party to learn from his successes. Thus, without further ado, I will take this post to thoroughly explore this matter.

To his credit, Ron Paul’s campaign demonstrated that Republicans can indeed keep up with Democrats in the era of Web 2.0, particularly in the areas of grassroots organization and fundraising. In addition, his campaign won the hearts of many young voters in a way quite similar to that of President-elect Obama. This begs two critical questions: how did Ron Paul manage to accomplish these significant feats despite being widely regarded as a “fringe candidate,” and more importantly, what lessons must the Republican Party take from his success?

Ron Paul’s Successes

Let us begin by looking at the many successes of the Paul campaign, and how his performance compares to that of the two most significant candidates of the cycle: John McCain and Barack Obama.

1. Ron Paul energized his supporters, resulting in an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm for his candidacy despite being supported by an extremely small percentage of voters. McCain’s campaign created a short burst of energy during his selection of Sarah Palin and the convention, but it proceeded to fizzle out as time passed. Obama’s campaign continuously energized its supporters, resulting in unbelievably massive crowds at his campaign events. A Gallup poll from October 2008 confirms this phenomenon, clearly indicating the enthusiasm gap that Democrats had over Republicans.
2. Ron Paul effectively used the Internet to organize his grassroots efforts. Relying on existing infrastructures like Meetup.com – where he was able to recruit over 86,600 members in 1,150 groups that planned and held over 51,000 offline campaign events – the Paul campaign had enormous success in this arena. McCain’s website had its own network called McCainSpace, but at many levels it was not especially groundbreaking, and in contrast to the online outreach by Obama and Paul, it seemed to be used fairly lightly by supporters. In contrast, Barack Obama successfully built an incredible network at my.barackobama.com by bringing on Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Ask almost any Obama supporter, and they’ll tell you that they used Obama’s online tools in one way or another. What’s unique about Ron Paul’s success, however, is that his campaign didn’t spend enormous resources building its own tools. Instead, it successfully took advantage of tools that already existed and thus was able to build an incredibly comprehensive national grassroots network without having to spend a significant amount of its own money.
3. Ron Paul’s ability to raise funds online is unparalleled in the Republican Party. Indeed, for the final quarter of 2007, Ron Paul outraised all of the other Republican Presidential candidates. McCain’s fundraising was generally unexceptional, and his strategic error in choosing to take public funding will almost certainly never happen again. And of course, we all know that Obama was a fundraising juggernaut, particularly online.
4. Ron Paul strongly appealed to young voters. Exit polls for early primary states like NH, MI, SC, and FL show that a disproportionately large percentage of younger voters pulled the lever for Ron Paul (in many cases, roughly twice the percentage of votes he received from other age groups). As we know from the exit polling of the general election, these young voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over John McCain: CNN pegs Obama’s advantage at 66% - 32%.

How Ron Paul’s Successes Came to Fruition

At the most basic level, it was Ron Paul’s common-sense and decidedly libertarian platform that created so much interest in his campaign. While some of his positions, such as his staunch opposition to the Iraq war, stand in stark contrast to the Republican agenda, the fact is that the core of his message is quite in line with the traditional Republican message: reducing the federal government’s size and cutting its spending.

What made Ron Paul distinct, however, was his passion and commitment to accomplishing this. If you had to identify the single most important policy issue in a hypothetical Paul administration, it would unquestionably be reduction of government. Unfortunately, you cannot unequivocally say the same about any of the other Republican candidates, and certainly not of John McCain (read: McCain-Feingold, among other things).

Ron Paul’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to his limited government principles brought a huge influx of dedicated supporters to his campaign. The resulting enthusiasm among these supporters translated into impeccable successes.

Lessons for the Republican Party

1. Democrats aren’t the only ones who can fully take advantage of the Internet, both in donations and in building a grassroots organization. Indeed, you don’t even necessarily need to build new tools to win the battle online. That said, in order to see Ron Paul-like success, there are two crucial components that must exist. First, you must have enthusiastic supporters who are not only willing but excited to help the organization. Second, you must be willing to allow online tools to step into areas that have traditionally been controlled internally, such as grassroots organization.
2. We cannot underestimate the importance of our ideals of smaller, less expensive government – and our candidates’ commitment to these ideals. To paraphrase a McCain stump line, Republicans were elected due to their promises to change Washington, but instead they let Washington change them. As a result, the voters turned to Democrats in 2006 and 2008, at least in part because they simply don’t trust us to keep our word. In 2010 and beyond, we need to run candidates who have a proven commitment to these principles – perhaps signing off on a Contract with America 2.0 similar to what I’ve previously suggested – and in doing so we will generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm for our candidates.
3. Successfully using the Internet saves money. A lot of money. Of the major Presidential candidates, Ron Paul’s campaign devoted by far the smallest percentage of its budget to paying staffers. One of the most important reasons for this is simple: by successfully using the Internet to build the grassroots backbone of the campaign, there was considerably less need to pay staffers to organize outreach efforts. Yes, the sheer notion of such a decentralized campaign may be unsettling to those who are used to running traditional campaigns. However, Web 2.0 is shaking up the foundations of many traditional infrastructures with resounding success. If we want to survive in this new era, we need to allow it to shake up our organizations, too. Just imagine if John McCain had been able to slash his campaign’s payrolls by just 15% due to such decentralization – in fiscal year 2007 alone (well before McCain was the presumptive nominee), McCain would have been able to save $2.3 million.
4. Republicans can win back the younger voting bloc. My experience has been that the vast majority of my peers – voters age 18-29 – fundamentally agree that they want the government in their lives as little as possible. The Republican Party is the party of individual freedoms and liberties, and if we can manage to resecure the public’s faith in this, we can win back young voters.

The bottom line is that we simply cannot afford to discount Ron Paul as a “fringe candidate” whose successes hold no lessons of value for the Republican Party. Instead, we must to adapt these successes into the new Republican Party. Viva la revolución!

President Barack Obama with a Stroke of a pen on January 20, 2009, will institute his own ideology by implementing and reversing eight years of Bush Executive Orders. The Washington Post reports, that "Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team." Another article from LifeNews.com also quoting the Washington Post Article stating that Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion business, told the Post that she expects Obama to rescind the protections on taxpayer-funded abortions and abortion counseling immediately after his inauguration. "We have been communicating with his transition staff" almost daily, Richards said. "We expect to see a real change." The Post also indicates that Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who has been one of the primary members of Congress pushing for embryonic stem cell research funding, prodded Obama during the campaign to make it a priority. She told the newspaper that supporters of funding the destructive and unproven research have already drafted language for an executive order that Obama can use. Responding to the news, Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition told LifeNews.com that Obama's making taxpayers fund abortion takes away from his claims to want to govern from the center and find common ground on abortion. Mahoney said "it would greatly increase abortions around the world. It would also create a scenario in which American evangelicals and Catholics would be paying for abortion referrals through their tax dollars." "If President-elect Obama reverses this policy, it would show a complete and blatant disregard for the faith values of millions of American Christians as well as expanding the violence and tragedy of abortion worldwide. America should be exporting justice and human rights, not brutality and violence," he said. On January 20, 2009 with the stroke of a pen Barack Obama plans to enact "Soft Tyranny" by exercising his executive power and not wait for congressional action. In a AP story, John Podesta, Obama's transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush's executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own. "There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," Podesta said. "I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set." Executive Orders have been used by sitting presidents since 1789 even though no provision or statute that explicitly permits Executive Orders exists in the U.S. Constitution. Only two Executive Orders have ever been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, so President Obama's pen may bring a "Soft Tyranny." Soft tyranny is an idea first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 work entitled Democracy in America. In effect, soft tyranny occurs whenever the social conditions of a people hinder any prospect of hope among its members, with soft tyranny comes hope lost and freedom lost for the individual and a movement for the good of the collective. C.S. Lewis in his work "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" expresses that this soft tyranny is the most oppressive because we as a people are tormented day and night for our own good. "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -C.S. Lewis from "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" I believe President Obama on January 20, 2009 with the power of his pen will increase the power of the State over the individual implementing a soft tyranny. Out of this tyranny is a government that believes that it must decide what’s in the best interest of their citizens, as opposed to the people themselves. -LEX REX http://theinvisiblehand.typepad.com

A new report from Rasmussen states that "Two days after Barack Obama became the first African-American to be voted into the White House, the percentage of black voters who view American society as fair and decent jumped 18 points to 42%".  As there are approximately 28 million African-Americans, that 18 percent translates to about 5 million people. This change will be--by far--the most important positive aspect for conservatism to come out of this election,  Certainly the numbers may not be stable.   Certainly a yes/no question hides as much as it reveals.  But look at the potential implications:

The belief that America is unfair motivates much of the liberal agenda including an activist court system, affirmative action, unions,  large government handouts, and taxes on the rich.  Conservatives value fairness, but also heavily value other concerns such as tradition, liberty, and stability.  It is easier to balance fairness with other concerns if you believe that your country is fair than if you believe your country is unfair.

Today, five million African-Americans are far more open to conservative thinking than they were just two weeks ago.  We should welcome our new allies and work hard to make them a permanent part of our movement.