Communications

An essay on how to prevail in arguments against the Left, entitled "The Right Way to Argue: How Conservatives Can Prevail in On-Line Debate" can be found at  http://liberty-resource-center.blogspot.com

The Rebuild the Party plan has often been characterized as a way to remake the party through technology. Though we've sometimes slipped in using that word to describe certain elements of the plan -- I generally feel uncomfortable with it being pigeonholed as a "technology" plan. I've generally struck "technology" from my vocabulary, taking instead about "new media" or simply, the "Internet" or when talking about a generational shift in fundraising or a 435 district strategy, wholesale party reform. Why? Because the word "technology" reinforces old siloed habits of thinking and implies that the solution is spending money on cool tech toys, rather than a quantum shift in approach.

If there is one thing the Republican Party is actually pretty good at right now, it's investing in "technology." From Voter Vault to the tools on GOP.com, the Republican Party has invested millions of dollars over the years in building the best political data-mining, microtargeting, and GOTV applications in politics.

This is vitally important. And it must continue. But the Rebuild plan focuses for the most part on something wholly different than these vital campaign technologies (where the GOP has to date held an advantage): getting the warm bodies who will actually use the technology and volunteer and donate.

The difference between the Bush '04 campaign and the Obama '08 is simple: the Obama campaign did the same thing, but with ten times more people. Technology was the instrument, but message was the impetus behind this shift.

Getting people to participate by the millions is the biggest job of the next RNC Chairman. That will require a wholesale overhaul in our message and how we communicate. First, the leadership and the grassroots will have to collaborate to shape the message. However one felt about the immigration debate, imposing change from the top as an elite project hatched at the White House was never going to fly politically. Ditto for spending, Medicare Part D, and to a lesser extent, education. The days of a leader deciding a message in a vacuum without grassroots input are over. There has got to be some buy-in from the grassroots -- or else you'll have a hollowed-out party with no boots on the ground. This is a pragmatic matter of survival as much as it is one of principle.

It also means changing our style of communication in a new era. Leaders have to be accessible, open, aggressive, and willing to throw the playbook out the window when necessary. Technology has made it easier to filter bottom-up input so that the good ideas rise to the top, so there is no excuse for at least some personal engagement with new media. Unless you're the guy with the nuclear launch codes, you're not too important to Twitter or blog at least every now and again.

Some of these reforms are substantive (changing the message) and others are meta (making people feel invested by applying a personal touch). And none of them are really dependent on technology -- I consider the Internet, blogs, Twitter, and YouTube to be media not technology per se. Here are a couple of other paradigms to think about in evaluating this fundamental shift in politics:

In a discussion among local party people about "how to bring the Republican party back", one idea crystallized that I would like help to flesh out. We discussed the fact that campaigns - in this particular context local campaigns -  need better support in terms of technology, communications, infrastructure and a lot more besides. The challenge is how to implement such great ideas in the context of campaigns that cannot afford huge budgets. Technology is making things cheaper, but there is a yawning gap between what is possible and what people know how to do.

So we came up with the concept of "Campaign-in-a-box" -  a manifest of all of the elements needed to support a basic political campaign (e.g., local-type campaign, state representative, county commissioner, etc.), that would enable a candidate not to get lost in the 'nuts and bolts' concerns of how to set up all the technology and communications infrastructure to support the campaign. It would be a manifest and implementation that provides all the basics to him or her so they dont have to build from scratch.

Consider it from this perspective. We are telling campaigns "get on facebook; get a YouTube account, post video there; get a way to issue press releases; ID your voters; build a website; etc." Well, giving such advice is useless to a candidate who is neither expert, nor does he even know where to start on these things.

So, let's collate that advice in the umbrella of ALL the advice and specific supporting implementations that a candidate would need. Can a local campaign leverage standard infrastructure for an effective campaign, and would such a concept lower the barrier for them to utilize more effective technology?
In other words, what should be the manifest for the "campaign in a box"?

Some specifics:

• Campaign website infrastructure and templates, e.g., can a Drupal implementation be templated to create a baseline campaign website to leverage? Many congressional campaigns use Drupal (e.g., Chet Edwards) so it or a CMS like it is a good starting point. What would be the must-have features, and what is a good implementation (low-cost/no-cost), so that a campaign wouldn't have to start from scratch? What Web 2.0/user generated content to have?
• YouTube, Facebook, twitter; what is the set of must-have online communications channels? Optional/maybe-do communication channels? Encourage use of videos and posting them
• How to interact with bloggers? Websites, forums and online groups to leverage?
• Communications / press office: The 'campaign in a box' includes a Press Release Kit - What's in it? How to establish good press relations?
• Voter database: Voter data should be a part of the package, so the question would be, what sort of database should be used, how should it be managed and integrated? What voter data is important? Mostly getting the "R" and "D" affiliation is just a first step, can more precise data be gathered? Should the candidate bother trying that? Is an integrated database important? How sophisticated should it be? (Again, think local-type race, where you might have 10,000 - 50,000 voters total).
• Campaign  basic strategy: Should the campaign-in-a-box have a basic strategy and what would it entail? What methods of outreach have the best ROI, and how should the local candidate be directed: Phone calls, blockwalking, neighborhood forums, finding key influencers, etc. Which to prioritize or should that be left to the candidate to figure out?

The reason this idea is important is that many campaigns with even good candidates flounder for the lack of a 'good campaign', and they rarely fail for lack of hard effort. They fail because the candidate, while they may know the issues, doesn't know how to run a campaign, and doesnt have the money to pay big-buck consultants to figure it out. A "campaign-in-a-box" would be a simple pared-down version of whatever its that Obama spent tens of millions of dollars putting together and which costs a hundred thousand or more for a Congressional candidate to put together.

A simple "How To" and manifest for a local candidate could go a long way towards making many of these campaigns more effective.

So ... Time to think INSIDE the box.  What should be in the Campaign-in-a-Box? What technology components are particularly effective/needed in this?

Here's to hoping that a few election cycles from now, pundits are on TV predicting the turnout of "Obama Republicans" the same way in which they discussed "Reagan Democrats" this year.
As many of you know, the phrase "Reagan Democrat" refers to those voters who consider themselves Democrats, and usually vote that way, but in 1980 and/or '84, they voted for Ronald Reagan.

Right now, there's no way to know for sure if first-time voters, disaffected Republicans and others will vote for the Grand Old Party in the future, but I wonder if we can work backwards.  I wonder if we can get them to vote Republican in the future and MAKE them "Obama Republicans."  And being a former Luntzian, I can't help but wonder if we can just communicate to these swing groups better.

Here's my take on two groups of potential "Obama Republicans"...

Drudge still has a headline up about Barack Obama announcing his Veep tomorrow, which Mark Halperin calls BS. My gut is that it is BS. Obama probably wants to wait until Wednesday or Thursday to delay the scrutiny until during the conventions. But the evening talk shows were about the VP speculation. Undoubtedly tomorrow will be about it. And the whole week will be.

The Obama campaign's tactics have been great. Now, don't get me wrong. As Open Left's Chris Bowers points out, it appears that John McCain's campaign is winning the war:

It is very difficult to not conclude that McCain is winning the messaging war right now. If Obama is winning in field, paid media, and free media exposure in a very Democratic year, what other explanation could there possibly be for his narrow lead nationally?

But every time there has been s significant float of a name by the Obama campaign, 2-3 days of media get sucked up. The Obama campaign is clearly doing it deliberately, when potential VP candidate Tim ("Hahahahahaha") Kaine cancelled a fundraiser, that was practically the only national political story for two days. When Obama did a long overnight in Indiana, a possible Evan Bayh VP candidacy got enormous coverage.

Now, tactics and skirmishes do not win wars. Ultimately, long-term strategies do. Right now McCain's strategy is based on substance, whereas Obama's often is not, as noted by The New Republic:

"They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter says. "The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels." Another reporter notes that, during the last year, Obama's old friends and Harvard classmates were requested not to talk to the press without permission.

But still. It is so frustrating to watch the Obama campaign dominate the media like this with nothing at all going on.