Erick Erickson

If you only read one thing this Christmas break, make sure it's Erick Erickson's post on rebuilding the party with technology. At the heart of it is an admonition not to confuse blogging with "technology." As Erick writes:

That a person can run a blog, has a Twitter account, edits and posts video to YouTube, has 1000 friends on Facebook, or can install a Joomla/Drupal/WordPress/MovableType/etc. site and customize the CSS does not make that person a technologist.

This is SO true. I've been in more than a few settings where a politician will want to talk to bloggers first about technology, not unlike how people approach Erick for his advice on tech. Yet all the bloggers would want to talk about when it came time for Q&A was politics not technology. Bloggers tend to be more tech savvy than the average, but what really drives them is politics and policy. Blogging is ultimately about good content not technology, just as a strong party has to be about a good message supported by today's technology.

What Erick is talking about is recruiting the people who build the tools, not just the people who use them, however avidly. When Ev Williams started Blogger and then Twitter, he wasn't thinking about how these tools could be used to revolutionize politics. He was just out to build a cool tool -- and opening up politics was just one of many applications of the technology.

The GOP needs geeks and engineers to build the tools. 115,000 people have just been laid off in the technology sector. There needs to be a concerted effort to identify those who are politically libertarian and conservative and get them to work building tools for the movement. I don't have any illusions that the majority of this group are on our side, but if we are better organized it won't matter. Even if we only have a pool of 10,000 to pick from, that's about 100 times better than what we have today.

But as much as we need people who are focused on the pure tech -- and this means more than just skinning the latest Web 2.0 fetish -- we still need better political operatives who will understand a good idea when it comes to them and won't cut the technology off at the pass. This doesn't mean they personally have to do technology, but they need to appreciate all the ways the Internet upends the traditional playbook.