local

Today, David Brooks gave praise to Reihan Salam's and Ross Douthat's new book, Grand New Party, in an op-ed entited "The Sam's Club Agenda". (Two days ago, Patrick Ruffini posted and encouraged everybody to start reading and debating.) I plan on going to the Barnes & Noble across the street from where I work today to buy it.

While I haven't read the book yet, Brooks made an interesting observation on Salam and Douthat's vision: "This is not compassionate conservatism (which flattered the mind of the compassionate donor), it’s hard-work conservatism, which uses government to increase the odds that self-discipline and effort will pay off."

Bottom line up front: all politics still seems to be local. While the federal government is involved in a lot of bread-and-butter economic issues for the middle class, voters obvioulsy feel very removed from what goes on inside the Beltway; yet, a larger amonut of folks pay attention to local and state issues, partly because you are more likely to have a connection and conversation on a first name basis with your city councilman or state representative than you are with your senior U.S. senator. (An unrelated question: how has new media affected the mantra that all politics is local?)

Major league/professional sports teams have "farm team" systems where they can identify and train prospects. The best franchises in baseball have fully developed minor league system: Red Sox, Yankees, Angels, etc. The NBA only recently saw the usefulness of having a minor league system with the NBDL. Here's an observational question (and I look forward to responses/disagreements/debate on this): Do the Democrats today have a better "farm team" system than the Republicans? My answer would be yes, because not only have liberal/left-leaning organizations and the DNC have been involved in identifying and training politicians and aspiring politicians at the local and state level; they have supported these candidates using Web2.0 tools like ActBlue.

[I also bring this up in light of a report that was released by House Republicans responding to why they just lost some special Congressional elections. The report apparently states that: "None of the candidates nor their allies successfully established themselves and their local brand in contrast to the negative perception of the national GOP."]

Now the real question: What can the next Republican Party do to develop our "farm team" system? The point here is that a lot of the middle class economic issues are problems that can be solved with conservative principles and policies at the local and state level: property/sales/severance taxes, transparency in budgeting, taxpayer-backed bonds, and accountability in education. And while we on the right like delegating power to state and local leaders on legitimate state and local issues, I believe that any national center-right organization and the next Republican Party need to have much closer coordination with state parties, local leaders, and potential local leaders to both identify (in the long term) those who can move up within the system and to identify (in the short term) local issues that are important to the middle class.

If we're going to have a broader Republican Party, and if we buy into Salam and Douthat's vision, developing the Republican Minor League will be just as important, if not more important, than keeping the Republican Major League in line.

- MM

[Promoted - In BlogNetNews Elections, David Mastio has built a very interesting, useful tool for tracking online conversations about specific races around the country.  I can see this being valuable not just to the campaign watchers, but also to the people actively involved in campaigns.   Please check it out - and make sure you submit additional races you want them to follow.  The "counsel" that Mastio kindly attributes to me was merely a couple thoughts about the user experience; the credit goes entirely to him and his team.

David Mastio has been a leader on the Right in developing good online products and services.  We need more people doing this. - Jon Henke]

Following local and state elections through the eyes of local bloggers is about to get a lot easier. For the last two years, my partner and I have been been building BlogNetNews.com to be the first bipartisan aggregator of public affairs and news blogs that covers all 50 states.  A typical page  gives readers links to the latest posts, the most popular posts , a local blog search engine and a bunch of other features.

But now that we have all 50 states built and the matchups for the Fall elections are starting to firm up, we've launched something I think is even more powerful. BlogNetNews.com/Elections

Click on the map and go to the state you want, then click on the race you want to read about. Two clicks simple.

Instead of relying on the MSM to be the filter of election news, BNN/Elections lets readers and bloggers use the blogosphere as a filter, gathering links and excerpts of all the latest posts in one place and constantly updating them.

All we need now is for the experts on the ground to help us find the most important elections to cover. We've already loaded in the governors races, the U.S. Senate races and many of the most competitive U.S. House races. At the bottom of each state page is a link to a form where you can suggest races for us to cover. We'll try to be updating every day this week within hours of your suggestions.

Thanks to Jon Henke's counsel, we've already started to add features that should make BNN/Elections more useful. Every state now has a permalink so you can skip the map once you know where you want to go and there is an RSS feed from the left and right for each race so you can subscribe to the posts you want to follow.

We're looking for your ideas on how to improve the site too, so send any ideas to me at editor@blognetnews.com or if you want to submit your blog to become part of BNN, all you have to do is shoot me your URL with the state you are in and if your blog is focused on state and local issues we'll add it to BlogNetNews.com and if you focus on national issues, we'll add you to RightyBlogs.com .