netroots

Once upon a time there was a Democratic politician named Chris Murphy who, before he got elected to Congress, made a point of how much time he spent walking around his district and talking to  indivdual people.  

Yep, lots of stuff about "listening to people" "crossing party lines",and "knowing about individual towns".  People tired of politicians "talking at people".

That was Chris Murphy trying to get elected. What does Murphy do while in office?

Well, he isn't crossing party lines since he supports Nancy Pelosi 99% of the time.

And he isn;t listening to people in his district anymore.  Remember last year's health care faceoff at the Simsbury Stop & Shop?

Not this summer ! He's doing "telephone town halls" so he can sit out of sight behind a screener.

And how can he listen to ordinary CT voters when he spent the weekend away from his wife and infant son to hang with the Netroots Nation at a swanky Las Vegas hotel?

Chris Murphy has decided he needs the far extreme liberal elements of the Democratic Party more than he needs the ordinary voters of Connecticut.  The Kos and Huffington caucus is now his political base, not western CT.  

Murphy isn't running for Congress anymore, he wants to pick up the torch carried by Ned Lamont  run for the Senate and be the hard-line "progressive" opponent to Joe Lieberman,

He lamented the lack of liberal arbor in the upper house at this little soiree hosted by the Kossacks

 This discussion of lessons learned in 2009 and 2010 about engaging with Congress to advance progressive policies will include emphasis on the Congressional Progressive Caucus and draw contrast with the Blue Dogs. We'll have a frank discussion of how House progressives choose issues to organize around; factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of successful organizing around an issue; the mechanics of moving policy through Congress, and where key leverage points for the Netroots are; case studies on healthcare reform and Afghanistan; House-Senate dynamics and what changes can be made to push progressive ideas more successfully onto the President's desk.

I note one of Murphy's co-panelists was Rep. Raul Grijalva, one of the leading opponents of the Arizona immigration enforcement law.  Amnesty much, Chris?

It's interesting Murphy spent the weekend hobnobbing with powerful liberals in Nevada, a state with 14% unemployment. He might have needed to go that far away to escape the 14% unemployment in Waterbury and the 12% unemployment in New Britain; issues he might care about if he deigned to commune with the commoners he claims to "represent".

The 2006 version Chris Murphy mouthed some words that matter. It is time to change the tone in Congress. It's time to elect citizen legislators who really care about their constituents, not use them as stepping stone to personal political glory.

In 1996 5th District Republican Gary Franks started his 1998 senate campaign before his House re-election. He was defeated. Same story, different year?  

A real down to earth candidate, Sam Caligiuri, wants Murphy's job. If elected, I am reasonably sure he will be spending his time in Newtown and New Fairfield, not Nevada. 

I told a friend last night - via Facebook private message - that email is still the best way to get a hold of me.* I gave him my work email address, which is the one account out of seven I currently monitor to which I will usually give an immediate response. It's also one of two accounts pushing to my smart phone, so I can receive/respond on the go.

The ways in which we send, receive, and store information have been constantly revolutionizing politics for nearly 600 years, since Gutenberg first invented the printing press. Customer relations management (CRM) systems have become increasingly important (indeed useful and necessary) in the political sphere, as candidate and issue campaigns build vast, scalable email lists for purposes of campaign communication. Somewhat curiously, I have all issue and candidate campaign email delivered to my American University address - which also pushes to my smart phone, but which I rarely actually read.

But let's assume just for a second that I consolidate my email accounts into just one, and I take time to read more than I do now - and a political campaign was able to reach me (in theory) 24 hours a day. Why is it, in this world of nearly instantaneous, targeted, scalable communications, that we still rely on direct mail fundraising? When does the 140-character tweet, the Facebook status update, or even the 30-second YouTube video replace a clunky, 5-page typed fundraising ask - double-spaced in 12 pt. Courier New font - and on pink stationary, no less? Does it ever? What about when we move all of our CRM solutions to the cloud, and we're realizing huge cost savings in our campaign budgets because of it (this is speculative, I'll admit)?

I remember from my Leadership Institute training days back in college that conservatives tend to make quite a bit of money on direct mail fundraising campaigns - my own experience tells me that you're doing well to just break even, particularly if you're using consulting services. Maybe my metrics are a little bit off, and I'm not considering how a mail piece to an identified voter/supporter may energize them, arm them with talking points, and ask them to tell 5 of their neighbors about my candidate or issue. Maybe I need better mail pieces.

Not only in my experience are dollar-for-dollar returns on direct mail doing well to break even, but isn't this social tree 1.0? Isn't this what social media was supposed to solve, in terms of reach, velocity, and scale? I posited in my undergraduate thesis - flying in the face of practical, conventional wisdom - that there's some kind of interpersonal transaction that takes place when one voter connects with another that technology can't replace, and I don't mean to waffle on that conclusion - but I do wonder, as our technology evolves and more milennials and digital natives reach voting age, whether or not direct mail is a worthwhile long-term investment. For the meantime, it's probably okay to assume that the average voter views the on-paper direct mail piece as more authentic or genuine an instrument than something that flies across their computer screen or smart phone, and for that reason, direct mail is still useful.

Candidates and causes also have a swath of social media and social networking tools at their disposal, tools that reach millions of end users (if leveraged properly) and which are also dirt cheap to a campaign, if not altogether free. Rob Willington of RebuildTheParty.com demonstrated as much in Scott Brown's bid for Sen. Edward Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat in a special election following Teddy's death (wait a minute, that wasn't Teddy's seat - it's the people's seat). Rob's use of text-messaging, geolocation applications, YouTube, Ning, and Facebook makes a really interesting case study in the use of these tools on the Right in the MyBO era.

Another important long-term consideration for campaigns on the Right is cost. I asked Willington during a Personal Democracy Forum conference call back in March, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Given the availability of free online tools, why should campaigns invest in proprietary enterprise architectures (e.g. www.CandidateName.com)? Will they be useful in the long-term for anything other than an online depository for campaigns?" His answer - and it's a good one, and again, I'm paraphrasing - was that a proprietary enterprise architecture anchors the spectrum of social media tools the campaign uses (each having its own brand recognition) with the candidate's brand, and acts as a vote getter. You can download and listen to the podcast here.

But given this, it shouldn't be long, in theory, before we totally scuttle on-paper direct mail pieces for fundraising purposes (messaging and relationship-building purposes notwithstanding). Additionally, in order to be really successful in the long-run, these tools need to build relationships: voter-to-voter and voter-to-candidate/voter-to-campaign. Melissa Clouthier has an interesting political spin on Mashable's "21 Rules for Social Media Engagement." Clouthier's conclusions assume a high-level of social media adoption across campaign space, and while candidates on the Right are dominating some social media channels, they don't own the Internet anymore:

In the long-run, the best "technology candidates" on the Right - as is the case with all other technological paradigm shifts - will be the early adopters, like Scott Brown. The candidates who do a great job of building relationships through social media on the campaign trail will have the highest chance of success in using tools while in office, both to foster transparency and to protect incumbency. In the meantime, the Right needs to continue developing an accurate, meaningful set of metrics to measure the success of social media strategies against traditional strategic results to make sure that candidates and causes get the highest ROI and the largest reach per dollar spent.

George Scoville also blogs at Liberty Pundits and his personal site Intelligence, Please... He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

* The double irony of this isn't lost on me. Not only is Facebook not very well known for its privacy at the moment, but I sent a Facebook message to relay an enterprise email address.

Flickr photo by Mike Bryant

Lost in the hubbub about the tea parties, the health care town hall protests, Joe Wilson, and the ACORN sting is the outcome of a long-simmering meta debate about the vibrancy of the grassroots right and its capacity to organize online. Along with a slew of other bad political indicators, the perception that the GOP might be stuck in a permanent Luddite rut reached its peak with the election of Obama and the role the Internet played in his victory.

Nearly a year later, not only have things turned around, but they've done so faster than anyone could have dreamed or imagined in those post-election doldrums.

First, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, flash mob-like, at Tea Parties not even three months after Obama Nation reached its apogee with the inauguration. The left was caught flat-footed and stammered that it must have been the creation of Fox News, although Fox News existed in the latter Bush years and during the McCain interlude and was unable to conjure up a similar display of enthusiasm in that period.

In August, the rightroots gained further velocity with the health care protests. This was significant in that it was the first head to head match with OFA and the unions, and it was no contest.

The third key moment came when Joe Wilson was able to raise as much (if not more) money than his Democratic opponent after the "You lie!" outburst. The left's immediate rallying around Rob Miller was a textbook netroots play, aided by ready-made infrastructure (an ActBlue page ready to accept contributions without crashing and display real-time feedback). For a Republican -- especially one deemed to be on the "wrong" side of a PR war -- to have been competitive in money raised with a netroots Democrat is something that simply would not have happened in the Bush years. This is especially striking given that Markos, Stoller, Bowers et al. made money raised for candidates the sine qua non of the netroots, an outgrowth of the left's 1970s era obsession with countering "big money" in politics.

Finally, the O'Keefe/Giles video bust of ACORN -- the right's biggest media coup since Rathergate -- showed the right to be getting its sea legs in investigative journalism, a space virtually patented by the left in recent years.

What we seem to be witnessing is the Feiler Faster Thesis in action, with a robust grassroots opposition to Obama, aided by the Internet, taking shape far more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and comparatively speaking, in a far more timely fashion than it took the left to gets its act together against Bush.

(The big asterisk in that comparison with the Bush years is 9/11 and the wars, but looking back to August and early September 2001, the Democratic opposition to Bush was weak and defined largely by spineless Washington pols like Tom Daschle rather than a sea of grassroots protest, which became apparent only later when the Internet became a viable organizing vehicle.)

So, the fear that Republicans would be disorganized for months if not years after Obama taking office has proven to be unfounded. The right's rise online (and offline too) has been a pretty automatic reaction to Democratic hegemony in Washington, disproving the notion that there is anything intrinsic to the right or the left driving the use of specific tools. And wrapping this up in a neat little bow, the political environment turns out to be the decisive factor in how emphatically people use the technology, not the other way around.

Understandably, not all of this has been online. Talk radio, and yes, cable news, still plays a role, particularly in the critical task of driving calls to member offices. As I noted on Twitter in August, 

For all the talk about lefty activism recently, it seems the right has an institutional advantage in contacting Congress... on every issue

From immigration to health care, most of the time you hear about a lopsided disparity with one side shutting down phone lines on Capitol Hill, it's conservatives doing it. While the political climate may dictate how effectively the tools get used, the right and left still have a tendency to focus on different things, with the right jumpstarting its movement in recent months with legislative advocacy and moving bodies to events, and while the left first built the netroots around raising money for candidates.

As a skeptic of the hegemony of money in campaigns and a believer in shoeleather organizing, it's not surprising to me that a newly resurgent right has made such an explosive impact on the national debate in the last two months. All the folks who wondered for five years where our response to the netroots was now have their answer.

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated” -Mark Twain

The Republican party is undergoing a rapid and drastic change. As we speak, all sorts of factions vie and joust for preeminence within a party that seems to be deflating overnight. People associated with the party for a long time look about them in disbelief, as if after an airplane crash where there seems nothing at all recognizable left of the original vehicle, just little pieces strewn as far as the eye can see.

It is speculated that the GOP have become the new Whigs, and will inevitably be cast aside in favor of a one party state into the foreseeable future. Of course, this sort of speculation is frivolous.

What happened to the GOP becomes clear with the benefit of some distance from the tremendous shifts of the 2006 and 2008 elections. It is linked to a massive shift across the board amongst our media, political class, and intelligentsia that has been so big as to have gone almost unnoticed until now.

The problem with the GOP from an electoral perspective in both 2006 and 2008 stem from a fairly simple source, but that source is deeply rooted and readjustment will inevitably be painful.

As a Congressional staffer, I worked on Capitol Hill, and saw the GOP leadership in the House from a relatively close vantage point. As a member of my generation, and coming as I do from California, I found the culture of Washington DC to be unique, and that found within Republican areas of Congress even more so. That is the first clue as to what went wrong for the party

Washington is anachronistic. The culture is a leftover from an earlier age. While the rest of the nation is culturally very firmly in the 21st century, the area inside the Washington DC beltway is probably approaching the 1980s or so. This cultural divide is a result of necessity, it is the natural effect of the machine that Washington is and the function it serves.

For decades, we were every bit the Republic. We sent our representatives to Washington based largely on our estimate of their judgment, with no idea what issues they may have to face in the years until the next election, and we judged them based on what we thought that they had done, based largely on the reports of a few media outlets and the statements they released themselves. Since the machinery for more direct government simply did not exist, this was the best system we could use, and it worked quite well for a very long time.

In the resulting culture within Washington itself, something I call the “cult of the gentleman”, and more negative people describe as an “old boy’s club” developed. It was the logical creation of our very political system, and it too had it’s uses. In this system, a person sent to Washington had to be a “gentleman” to get anything done. A gentleman was somebody who was first and foremost loyal to his friends, who stood absolutely on his word to his close associates, and who closed deals with a handshake, not a contract, and certainly never a press release. Because representatives were there to act as independent agents on behalf of the voters, and could receive but little input from those voters thanks to distance and technological limitations, they were effectively on their own. They had to rely on their own judgment exclusively, and since the landscape of Washington is composed of other such persons, the first skill they had to know was how to be a gentleman, so as to get along with the other Washingtonians, so that they could get something done; because you could not accomplish anything if you could not sign others on to your initiatives.

This is where “horse trading” comes from. Elected agents would agree to support one another, just as bloggers today mutually link to one another for support. One would vote for the bill his friend proposed, not based on the contents of that bill, but based on his relationship to it’s author. In return, one of his bills would be supported. This was logical, since politicians could rely on face to face contact with people they spoke to every day, and had to rely on one another’s word, just as their constituents relied on them based on their word.

What has happened in the last ten years is a technological revolution in America that is easily as significant as the opening of the first newspaper presses in the American Colonies. This change was rapid, and it has not yet reached the full extent of it’s tremendous impact on our whole civilization. Suddenly, average voters are able to track, through a constant stream of information coming onto the internet, the activity of their representatives in far greater detail than ever before. Suddenly people could speak back quickly and efficiently in real time, and they could use the internet to organize rallies and political activities all by themselves, coming together like the crystal in saline solution; spontaneously, with only a small spark.

In the old Washington, you voted for the bill your friend proposed because he was close and your constituents were far away. It is quickly changing into a situation where your constituents are close and your friend is far away; separated by the barriers to human interaction we all experience as information flows at us in an ever increasing stream. This utterly changes the paradigm for Washingtonians, but they are the last to realize it.

What we ourselves do not realize is the extent to which this has shifted the political game in the United States. Nor do we understand how irrevocable that shift has been. Both the Democrat and Republican parties have for many decades had two fundamental factions within their ranks; “personality politicians” and “ideology politicians”. To a greater or lesser extent, virtually every politician of any party can be placed in one of these two categories.

A personality politician runs on his personality, he makes the case that he can be trusted with the power to represent a given region because of his inherent judgment, character, or wisdom. The ideology politician makes the case that his ideology (which he will elaborate if he wants to be successful) is one which most closely represents the people of his district. This is a divide long understood and written about by political scientists; the obligation of a politician to try to accurately represent his constituents or the obligation of a politician to use his own judgment. There is no one answer to this, it is not black and white, and a politician will always have to strike some balance between what he perceives to be the will of his constituents and what he perceives to be the right thing to do.

As a result of far greater technical ability to follow every word and action of politicians, via people recording them with cellphone cameras, vloggers following them with palmcorders, and the old established leakers and journalists of days gone by, we have become a far more well informed body politic than previously. The result is the triumph of the ideological politician over the gentleman politician.

Now, traditionally, an ideologue was mistrusted in Washington, because they necessarily saw everything through the lens of their ideology. Nobody wanted to work with a guy who lived his life as a result of a political ideology. Why is this? Just think about it, you may vote for a guy who does nothing but spout his political ideology, and who becomes fiery and enraged when somebody strays from the political line, but would you want to have a drink with him in the Republican Club (or local bar)? Even more to the point; would you want that guy in your living room all the time? No, gentlemen, though ideologically slippery, were far and away more congenial to be around, and even when standing in opposition to you, were ready to go out for cocktails after the day’s joust was over. Thus, ideologues gained a reputation as people who couldn’t be taken seriously. They could raise an angry mob back home, but in DC, they couldn’t get anything done, because they estranged people.

But you say, if we are “closer” now to our politicians than we were, shouldn’t the gentlemen be rewarded for being personable? In answer, I ask if you have ever read the comments on your average youtube posting. We do not consider the internet to be equivalent to sitting in the bar with someone or we wouldn’t treat online postings the way we would a bathroom wall at a truck stop. We would never think to write on any part of our homes what we write on online forums. No, we are incredibly critical, often hostile, and always highly ideological when online, and are personable, quiet, neighborly, and uninterested in politics when we meet our neighbors mowing their lawns. That is the America of the 21st century.

Simply put; he is rewarded who can consistently put forth an ideology and intelligently defend it, and is rewarded more to the extent that that ideology is broad and consistently fits with the facts of our world. What a gentleman politician can explain eye to eye in a cocktail lounge inside the Beltway sounds like absurd flip-flopping when he explains it in writing to an online critic. In this environment, ideology is king.

The Democratic party has already dealt with this revolution, but the GOP is only going through this transition now. Back in the late 1990s, I was very surprised at the degree to which the Democratic party was beginning to drift leftward. This accelerated rapidly after President Clinton left office, and I was puzzled, and incorrectly assumed (based on 20th century political calculus) that as they moved hard to the left, they would alienate the center, which they needed for national office.

You saw personality politicians in the Democratic party left behind (Sen. Joe Lieberman is a perfect example). I knew something significant was going on when the Democrats could nominate Lieberman as Vice Presidential nominee for the 2000 election, only to abandon him as too centrist in 2006. How could a party move that much, ideologically speaking, in so short a time? How could Al Gore run as hard left as he could, for as long as he could and still be sidelined and honestly be probably too moderate for today’s Democratic party? How could Hillary Clinton have been undermined and ultimately toppled from the left in 2008? Even more interesting is why the Democrats could move so hard to the left and win such a big majority in the 2008 election if the entire nation has not shifted very much?

Clinton lost in 2008 because she was using the old calculus; you have to win the middle, and personality is more important than consistent ideology. Simply put, in the no holds barred debate forum of today’s America, a politician who consistently maintains a single ideological stance over time will win out over one who does not. Just consider the case of the criticism of Hillary’s vote on the Iraq war. Just look at Barack Obama’s voting record. He is as rock-ribbed liberal as you can be. With so many easy to use online rating systems and sites that describe every vote a politician ever made, it is easy for bloggers and pundits, and anybody else to look at a voting record boiled down to hard facts. It is easier to defend a consistent record from critics who disagree with your premises than to defend an inconsistent record from people who question your judgment.

If we analyze any one vote to make a demonstration, we should look at the most important vote cast by the Republican majority since the decision concerning the Iraq war; the financial services bailout vote of August 2008. In this vote, the GOP was split. The party divided neatly between those who stood by the Bush administration, and those who stood by Republican ideology. Tradition would dictate that a party stand by a guy they had gone to lunches with and spoken to face to face, and who was probably 75% kosher ideologically from a GOP standpoint, not that they would throw an old colleague and fellow gentleman to the wolves the first time he makes a major break from the party line. Tradition was wildly out of date in 2008, as the Democrats, still reeling from their own internal bloodbath, knew perfectly well.

The Republicans were left behind because of the nature of being in power in Washington. Remember where I said the Democratic shift accelerated after the end of Clinton’s Presidency? When a party is in power, they are very busy; they are working with other members of their party inside Washington. Ideas are bouncing from the Republicans in the House and Senate to the White House, back over to the Congress, and being churned over and put into laws or discarded. The fast pace, and volume of work to be done in running our nation do not allow a lot of time for reflection. White House staff consider it normal to suffer a rolling staff turnover as people burn out after a year or two in those conditions. In this environment, with the best and brightest in a party occupied by their jobs, there is no time or energy left for a rethinking of the party itself, and traditionally, this has led to a party too long in power getting out of touch with the country.

In this case, it isn’t just a matter of being out of touch, but a small matter of the most significant communications revolution since radio taking place across the world. The Democratic party was out of power and therefore subject to the rapid changes. This was well documented by the media, who speak of the “netroots” movement. What is not being considered is the truth that this revolution in two way communications is not limited to the left wing in politics, nor is the Internet as a whole liberal; certainly, despite the impressions given by early internet being linked to academia, it is far less liberal than the major conventional media outlets such as newspapers or television.

This brings me to predictions. We see today that the steady, individually tiny, and collectively overwhelming pressures of rapid feedback are utterly transforming our conventional media. Newspapers are increasingly obsolete. If a columnist wishes to be heard, he can make a blog like everybody else and his writing will stand on it’s own merit, not his ability to fight a bureaucratic battle within a little news company hierarchy. If he complains that he needs money, let him make a blog as well. Successful bloggers have found ways to make more money blogging than the average columnist makes writing columns. We, the blogosphere, feel no pity for the newspapers.

Major television, no matter how big the mother company, is not immune. MSNBC was moved further faster, but we see CNN also polarizing in their editorial outlook hard to the left, while Fox polarizes more and more to the right. All the media outlets are giving up the idea of “objective” journalism in favor of the far more honest understanding that everybody has some kind of bias one way or another and it is better for everybody if that bias is known in advance and not concealed. This is precisely what is effecting politics as well. We want reliability and predictability from our politicians and news anchors, not so much personality. This was the death of John McCain, whose war hero record was necessarily non-ideological, and therefore necessarily irrelevant to the principal debate. While Obama could defend a consistent stance, even if it was no the same as the majority of the country, McCain had none. We respect those we disagree with utterly but who honestly believe what they believe and stick to their guns; we do not respect those who seem to have no philosophy whatever.

This is why the GOP seemed like the party of the old boy’s club. This is why the party seemed to have no ideology at all. This is why the GOP leadership seemed to betray the country on the most important legislation in a lifetime, when it so obviously was opposite their ideological stance against out of control government, and it is why the Democrats are veering so hard to the left in so many ways in so short a time.

McCain lost the Presidency when he came back to Washington, suspended his campaign, the nation held it’s breath, and then instead of siding with the vast majority of voters against both an unpopular President Bush and his opponent, he simply echoed both of them on the bailout issue, losing his credibility and watching his poll numbers evaporate. At that moment, his campaign was lost and they knew it.

As a result of this new world, the GOP will re-form. It will do so even if it does not want to, but will be forced to by the will of the American people to have some check on the other party. The Republican ranks will be purged of those who cannot consistently defend their ideology or even explain what it is. Gentlemen will be brutally dropped, just as we saw in the bloodbath that left a former Democratic nominee for Vice President end up supporting the opposite party’s nominee for President only eight years later. What happened amongst Democrats will now happen on an accelerated time scale with the GOP, and it will look messy, but in the end, the party will be reborn far more fit, far more in tune with today’s America, and ultimately, since we have not lurched to the left as a nation, with very good prospects considering that all this is taking place in a center-right country.

For more commentary visit www.jubalbiggs.wordpress.com

By the standards of the Obama campaign and MoveOn.org, the Tea Parties happening all across the country are not very organized. Contra Talking Points Memo, no single group "owns" or is instigating tomorrow's events. The closest thing one could call to a centralized Tea Party homepage is Eric Odom's TaxDayTeaParty.com. Freedom Works has popularized a Google Map which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times that's become the unofficial directory of the event. Newt Gingrich is driving attendance through his American Solutions (a/k/a Drill Now) list, as are a myriad of other groups.

Contrast this to a MoveOn or MyBO (now OFA) mobilization during the election. A single group would send out a call for a single day of action to its massive e-mail list (in MoveOn's case, this would go to 5 million people; in Obama's, to 13 million people). They would direct people to an online event planning tool, which would either have the hallmarks of MoveOn's internal toolset or the Blue State Digital "PartyBuilder" toolset. Host and attendee information would be hosted on a centralized database. Reminder e-mails would be sent at timed intervals through the same technology. It would be a relatively clean, seamless, and centralized process.

Nothing of the sort has happened with the tea parties, at least from a technology and logistics perspective. Organizers have had to self-report their events to various national groups. One group claims credit for putting one set of events; another group for a different set. It's a much messier process that belies the stereotype of the right as a group of mindless automatons.

This is why it's amusing to watch the left try to debate Jon on the charge of "astroturf." MoveOn virtually invented massively replicable online grassroots organizing -- which many would equate with astroturf, in that activity is actually being directed by a few people at the top, and thousands of people on the ground are (willingly) following orders.

If there are talking points, sample agendas, syncronized start and end times, or standard branding and collateral for the tea parties, I haven't seen them. When Tom Matzzie and Eli Pariser did it old school and decided to send an e-mail to drive people to, say, an Iraq War vigil, they instantly created a level of organization we haven't yet seen in the tea party movement.

And that's okay.

The lack of coordination is a sign of a still-young movement that's just learning to organize online in earnest. And arguably, the advantage brought by a massive e-mail list is much impressive now than when MoveOn pioneered the practice in 2002 and 2003, its heyday.

With viral distribution through Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, it's a lot easier to get a message out from an organizational baseline of zero. Riffing off Clay Shirky, it's the power of organizing without organizations. In the Age of Email, those who could aggregate large lists had all the advantages when it comes to organizing. This is still somewhat true, but word can spread faster through networks of influentials with hundreds and thousands of Twitter followers than it can one-to-many through a large list. There was always the hope that people would forward the e-mail to their friends, but one of the dirty little secrets of e-mail is that the "forward to a friend" button on most e-mail blasts is at best an orphan child. Only the most scurrilous (Obama's a  Muslim) or funny e-mails tend to spread purely virally.

As William Beutler wrote the other day, the left is seriously underestimating Twitter, and in a classic judo move, is parlaying the uncertainty of who's really behind the tea parties into charges of "astroturf." Occam's Razor would suggest this nebulousness is a sign of a lack of central organization, not the other way around.

For all its supposed online prowess, it could be that the left is starting to forget the value of distributed online organizing. The Stollers of the world have spent a lot of time studying the myth of the "vast right wing conspiracy" in a bid to centralize power within their movement under the new netroots institutions and take it away from single issue groups they don't control. To them, the only valid model once they've actually achieved power is a centralized one (see Townhouse, or the 8:30 Podesta conference calls). It may be true that the power brokers in their ideal world will look very different. They understood early on that one could use the Internet to crush the old power structure -- to create a new one in its place. But at the end of the day, the model they've settled on is one-to-many, and their world is run through large e-mail lists or big blogs like Daily Kos where it's still mostly about the blogger. The Obama campaign was still more about using the web to create a ruthlessly efficient organization than it was about creating an open community. 

The messier, more unpredictable, and more freewheeling examples of online activism -- from the Ron Paul campaign to tea parties -- have been on the right. The right's is a different model. One that the left -- and many of our friends the right -- do not completely understand yet.

Practicing Politics in the Twitter Era: If we are to speak of the age of online politics -- and I am not certain that we should -- let's say we've lived through the Blog Era (2001-04), the YouTube Era (2005-08) and now we are in the Twitter Era (2008-?). This screen shot of a blog post at Media Matters (of all places) juxtaposing tweets from Newt Gingrich and Matt Cooper -- proof alone that everyone in Washington is using Twitter -- provides a useful snapshot of the how Twitter works alongside the blogosphere (rumors of its death still exaggerated) in moving political messages online:

Zing.

So the Right had a vibrant 'sphere in the post-9/11 Warblogging Period, which drifted after the 2004 election, as frustrated soon-to-be-ex-Pajamas Media bloggers can tell you. The Left owned the YouTube era, which happened to coincide, not coincidentally, with President Bush's second term. Their political blog infrastructure was developed largely on the participation of bloggers and blog readers, not anyone using Twitter yet, most of the time because Twitter did not exist or see any significant usage until SXSW 2007. (You know who I can't find on Twitter? MoveOn.)

For at least a year now, the Right again has been leading the way on an Internet-based communication platform. So far it's to organize for Conservatism somewhat broadly as a unifying cause. Top Conservatives on Twitter is not quite a MoveOn for the Right -- a whispered-of but ultimately mythical animal not unlike the "Party-in-a-laptop" idea popular with some Neoliberals -- but it could have more value as a list than Gingrich's own Drill Here, Drill now efforts and even the (also short-time) #dontgo message it spawned last August. These new conservative projects are often built around Twitter itself. Sometimes this results in really annoying tweets, but at this point the right is doing more interesting things in this space. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, but makes up for it in volume of press hits (hopefully someone with Nexis can back this up for me) and news reports that its traffic is about to go all hockey-stick. Maybe it will go Galt as well.

Conservatives also have other, much older infrastructure whose blogging component counts a few successes but still relies on decidedly Web 1.0 websites, and so hasn't taken as big a hit in the Great Blog Crash of 2008-09. And like companies of the dot com crash (including Google itself), the concepts and websites that clawed their way out of the rubble did not and will not bring back substantial returns in the short run. Twitter, by its sheer simplicity, is kind of a Long Tail product in that we can (and often seem to actually do) use it in spare moments between the day, which means its audience could approach that of e-mail (especially since, you know, you need an e-mail account to join Twitter). Either could build that kind of reach, depending on who experiments more through the rest of the arbitrary era proper.

Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever:

According to Internet marketing blog Hubspot, the right's #TCOT momentum means it vastly outnumbers the hashtags left-leaning Twitter users and bloggers... er, aren't listed as using, not here at least. Hmm. So which hashtags do the left use?

Pause for dramatic effect.

Turns out the left-verse doesn't do hashtags at all, that I could see from checking these accounts over the weekend:

• markosmoulitsas
• jedlewison
• matthewstoller
• ttagaris
• janehamsher
• Atrios
• ezraklein
• glenngreenwald
• KagroX
• openleft
• mmfa
• owillis
• mattyglesias

My question for the Left is whether the port side of the Twitterverse will adopt the same habit of hashtags that moves stories -- and if it does, whether it will even be led by the Kos-Greenwald-Marshall-Hamsher-Klein-Stoller-Yglesias Netroots movement. (Note: In the comments at Blog P.I. a fellow Twittizen points out there is a website collecting progressive hashtags: Tweetleft. And as she observes, organized hashtag use lies beyond "'the usual' accounts.")

And my question for the Right is whether they know any of the Top 5 Conservatives on Twitter, because I haven't got a clue.

Benchmark note: As of Sunday afteroon, Markos Moulitsas (2,411) has 7,288 fewer followers than John Culberson (9,699).

Adapted from a post at Blog P.I.

I've been meaning to write about this for a week, but work commitments beckoned. Nonetheless, it is still worth noting that something stunning almost happened last week: a huge piece of lefty online infrastructure nearly collapsed, when Soapblox sustained hacker attacks and was nearly shuttered by the developer who ran it part-time. Seeing the danger, the progressive community online has rallied to Soapblox's aid, vowing to raise the money necessary to defend it from further attack.

What is Soapblox? It's a self-service tool to build a community blog with user diaries and a recommendation engine out of the box, and runs most of the influential progressive state blogs in the country, in addition to influential national blogs like Open Left and Swing State Project. It's also another thing that they have and we don't -- though it's a little known fact that Soapblox is actually open to conservatives (see Red Mass Group).

I don't think it's any secret that the conservative blogging scene at the state level is woefully inferior to its lefty counterpart. Technology is only part of it; the bigger issue is a lack of willing bloggers with the political sophistication to drive unique and compelling content (this is an issue I'll have an announcement on in the coming days). This isn't to say that there aren't great conservative state blogs: Minnesota Democrats Exposed (run by Michael Brodkorb, a former communications director at the state party), Sound Politics (raised up in the crucible of the WA-GOV theft of 2004), Right Michigan (run by former campaign staffer Nick De Leeuw), and the aforementioned Red Mass Group (run by Rob Eno, a former research director for GOP campaigns in the Bay State). While I could mainly pinpoint this handful of excellent righty state blogs, virtually every state has a thriving progressive hub that the political class in that state looks to and which drive left-of-center storylines with the statehouse media.

This is really unfortunate, because we know works on state and local blogs: great content, usually driven by former campaign operatives who know exactly where the bodies are buried, combined with a great community, which Soapblox enables by automating the process of standing up user diaries. Counterintuitively, diaries and comments are even more important on a local blog despite its smaller scale because most of the participants actually know each other, leading to vibrant backchannel discussions and a watercooler effect. Occasionally, this incestuous environment leads to things getting super-vicious as when threats of outing shuttered the anonymous Caucus Cooler and Krusty Konservative blogs covering the Iowa caucuses in 2007.

However essential Soapblox may be to fostering the local liberal blogosphere, how they did it shows the danger to conservatives who may be looking to stand up and/or fund similar technology projects in the wake of Obama opening our eyes to this years too late.

There's been a lot of talk about the future of the mainstream media, including how and when newspapers will die. Earlier this summer, I blogged on whether or not TV ads are now a waste of money in political campaigns. But there hasn't been as much discussion about the future of the Internet.

Yesterday, Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project released The Future of the Internet III, a "survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts" on how the Internet will evolve over the next decade and how it will shape society (or how society will shape the Internet even further.) I am not a Web 2.0 expert like others who write here, but some of the key findings evoke several questions on how the evolving Internet will impact the future political campaign:

"The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020."

It seems like the mobile device will be the primary tool of 24-hour news cycle as more and more people move away from CNN and Fox News towards Twitter updates on their BlackBerry from the New York Times or RSS Feeds from the Politico on iPhones. What kind of political (or commercial) ads will voters see on Twitterific or in the sidebars of sites they visit? And with so many ways to communicate with voters on mobile devices, what will the primary objective of these "mobile online ads" be? To get your email address or phone number so that you can be texted? More importantly, what kind "mobile online ads" would be tolerated by the user? How can the political ad on the mobile device not become spam?

"The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness."

True. Politics will always have a few people like Rod Blagojevich. But Soren rightfully points out that the GOP should take on a transparency and ethics agenda, and the Internet is the obvious portal by which, for instance, "faster and more complete campaign finance information" can be transmitted. And with the growth in ability to show video on mobile devices, will the demand for "putting video of all publically accessible business meetings online" will grow? More importantly, there's a real possibility that increased transparency can initiate a more substantive two-way conversation between voters and candidates. Will the future of the Internet as a transparency portal allow voters to ask for information from campaigns and allow campaigns to more instantly respond to information requests?

"The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations."

My first reaction would probably be similar to Patrick's: that the Internet is not just about blogs and Twitter ... and that investment in grassroots organizations will still be much more important that in old and/or new media buys. In order to be a registered voter, you still have to have a physical place of residence. But with personal and work time being merged as well as physical and virtual reality, campaigns, state parties and the national party organization have to embark on a long term, on-going voter indentification efforts to see where people spend most of their time online, what their online and offline interests are and how they intersect, where and how often they get their news, etc. What other questions would be relevant in such a voter identification project?

As the summary of the report states, the respondents "disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives." But as the physical and virtual interaction and communication between human being start to overlap, how campaigns interact with voters will have to be re-examined.

What lessons are to be learned from recent news that conservative advocacy group, Freedom’s Watch (FW), is shutting their doors? Mistakes of 2008 must be the stepping stones upon which the future of the conservative movement is built. Here are some thoughts on the FW collapse: 

The Freedom Coalition is scrambling. Bipartisan bailouts and a profligate Republican Party seem not only to have conjured up the specter of Keynes but the American Left in force. The left has outsmarted the center-right Freedom Coalition in all the ways that count. That is, our democratic republic is, and always has been, about getting that 50 percent plus one. The left has figured this out and put the bulk of its investments behind this fact. And while we may like to tell ourselves that 'politics goes in cycles,' no one may credibly doubt the effort and organization of Democrats and progressives and the failure of the Freedom Coalition to adapt.

Meanwhile, as libertarians smugly explained the irrationality of voting – you know, clustering problems, paradoxes and the improbability of the tie-breaking vote – leftwing activists have spent a fortune in time and money getting people to do something irrational. And it worked. Aging right-wingers have been content to jockey their wingback chairs and will their estates to AEI, Cato or Heritage, so these goliath think tanks can print up yet more high-quality policy reports 250 people will read. This is a problem.

The Think Tank Bubble

F.A. Hayek is known among freedom lovers as describing the structure of production. The idea is often rendered as a triangle cut into thirds, like a simple hierarchy: At the top are the raw materials (say, silicon). The second slice is the capital goods (assembly line). Then come the consumer goods (iPod, marketing). The idea is of a production process whereby resources pass through each stage before finally satisfying human wants and needs.  Likewise, we can imagine socio-political change going through a similar process. First, you have some abstract academic theory, which filters down to the think tanks and policy shops, finally to be run through the legislative sausage grinder or presented to voters as talking points. That's the 30,000 foot view. From ideas to policy to implementation (or from academia to think tanks to ordinary politics). Obviously, the structure of social change is much more complicated than this simplified model reveals. But it's largely correct. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Now, if we look at the average "freedom portfolio" we're going to see something that will go very far in explaining the Freedom Coalition's most recent voting booth humiliations—an investment bubble. Too many resources are going to think tanks—that is, that second slice of the structure. (The left has put most of its resources into implementation, never mind academia, which it has always owned.) Any renaissance of the Freedom Coalition will require freedom-lovers to divest themselves of legacy think tanks and start putting their freedom investments into something else. But where?

First, the Freedom Coalition is going to have to play catch-up on the one hand and tit-for-tat on the other. To figure out how to compete, it will have to look at the competition for benchmarks. What are they doing right? If the Freedom Coalition does its due diligence, it will find a second-mover advantage. Then, the right is going to have innovatively to reconfigure itself around what it has learned: new media; mass media, branding and marketing and get out the vote (GOTV)—and any other unseemly aspect of deadweight activism. Individualist-types may find this unsavory. We prefer ideas and analysis to groupish activism. We relish the holistic logic of market solutions and believe the world must kneel to rational argument. Tough. That's not the world in which we find ourselves. So unless we're prepared to argue with the machine or take up arms and rebel, we've got to play the implementation game and play it better. (Part Two here - Max Borders, Free to Choose Network)