pdf2008

These were my prepared remarks on the "Changing Role of the Rightroots" for my keynote with Jane Hamsher at PDF yesterday. I can't say it was exactly the same as delivered as I arrived at the venue 5 minutes before my rescheduled session was to begin, leaving little time for extra preparation, but this expands a bit more on some of the key points.

I'm here to answer that elusive question: Who are these Republicans on the Internet? And what will it take to unify them in 2008 and beyond? 

The answer is a lot more interesting than it would have been a year ago. That's because in the real-life give and take of a Presidential primary, you always discover things you didn't know before.

We find that unfailingly, like water always finding its way into the cracks, people turn to activism when something urgent needs to be done.  

So who are these people?

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." - George Orwell

When the Huffington Post launched on May 9, 2005, most conservatives including myself, sneered. To be sure, there was plenty to sneer about, with the likes of John Cusack passing verbal gas about his experiences months earlier at Hunter S. Thompson's funeral. It was a clearinghouse of mostly worthless opinions, many of them from Hollywood.

Since then, HuffPo has evolved into something very different: the newspaper of the Internet, with a concerted strategy to expand into content verticals like Entertainment (going for the Perez Hilton link love) and Local, starting with a Chicago edition. It's doing real investigative journalism (meet Mayhill Fowler, Obama donor). They've hired serious investigative/research types like Nico Pitney away from the Center for American Progress.

Arianna confirmed this basic approach in her talk today at PDF, and it is scary.