The Changing Rightroots

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?

A year ago, we would have pointed to the rightroots as a relatively small blogger elite. They're  people who care about the war, spending, and judicial nominations in that order. Though their influence is minimized, they have grown quite effective at influencing decisionmakers in government. There's a reason why RedState focuses on being the most read blog among Republican Capitol Hill staff. And a reason why in the heat of the immigration debate last year that the White House political operation sent its staff to respond directly on conservative blogs. Because it was the blogs that were supplying the documentary evidence of the legislative chicanery behind the immigration bill. If talk radio was still providing the shock troops calling offices, it was bloggers who built the narrative of legislative secrecy by posting the full text of the bill for public review long before it was introduced, providing an impetus for action.

These are the people who forced a President to withdraw a Supreme Court nominee. Who tag-teamed with talk radio to stop an immigration bill. Who called office to office to office trying to flush out the secret hold on an earmark transparency bill. On many fights, they've proven that they're people not to be messed with.

Though the focus here today will naturally be on the election, we can't ignore these kind of governing impacts, as the end goal of campaigns is government. Naturally, this only works when you have a White House and Congress to govern, but in this sense the conservative blogs adapted well to their role as members of the governing party.

In the last year, this circle has widened.

Social conservatives have never been well represented in this coalition. With the Huckabee campaign in the primary, we saw the emergence of a fervent evangelical community that was active online and would engage politically. Zephyr Teachout, no fan of Huck's politics, has called this best run online campaign of the cycle. Why? Because it didn't just materialize out of thin air and fall in the campaign's lap, like Ron Paul and Obama. They took something that literally didn't exist in June or August and leveraged it into a resilient challenge that went on beyond Super Tuesday. The blogroll for Huck, which anyone could submit themselves to, consisted mostly of very small blogs off the beaten path.

Today, Huckabee is the only candidate who has truly embraced on what he built in the primary and is working to leverage it. The posts on his blogs get hundreds of comments. And they're giving Ron Paul people a run for their money in sending thousands to vote for Huckabee in online VP polls. I know. I've been on the recieving end.

And what about the 800lb gorilla of the Republican Internet, Ron Paul?

There's an intense debate as to whether he or his supporters are part of the rightroots. I think some are, and some aren't. But leave that aside for a moment. In both the campaign and the post-campaign, his people have taught us two valuable lessons.

First, the moneybombs truly did leapfrog anything that had been tried to date. They solved a key challenge of campaigns, which is how to collect a lot of money online outside of a few days before a crucial election -- when the money probably isn't going to make much difference anyway. For all he did, Obama didn't really solve this -- his fundraising has dropped precipitiously from $55 million in February to $22 million in May as the sense of urgency has waned. This was an interesting innovation. I'm not sure how easily it can be replicated, but it shows how groups like MoveOn on the left which have mastered the art of sending to large lists can be leapfrogged. They gave us a fleeting glimpse of the End of Email.

Second, his movement exposed just how hollowed out many of the offline institutions have become. After the campaign, they set out to take control of county Republican parties and state Republican conventions. And many times, they won -- electing many Ron Paulites technically pledged to vote for McCain at the national convention. Some states reported that up to 30% of their elected delegates were Ron Paul Republicans.

This might be a bit controversial, but this happened not because the Paul movement was so strong -- it is a relatively small group of people networked on the Internet -- but because it's now really, really easy for decaying offline infrastructure to be taken over when the alternative is small and networked on the Internet.

Small and networked beats big and atomized.

Is it any wonder that the Republican campaigns who relied on the high dollar bundling failed, while those that were small and relied on being organically interesting succeeded? You can't astroturf your way to the presidency.

More than a year ago, if you'd asked us if the strongest grassroots forces on the online right would come would have come from Paul and Huckabee supporters, we'd have looked at you funny.

And who would have guessed that something like a petition from Newt Gingrich for a previously obscure issue like domestic oil drilling would have over a million signatures so far, more than double that first storied MoveOn petition?

The challenge with the right isn't activism. As we've seen in this election cycle, activism on the right can be pretty tenacious and take root in the unlikeliest of places, even if it's not always aligned with the party. The challenge is unifying it. There are a number of different threads to Republican online activism right now, not all of them in perfect harmony with one another.

The reality is that it may take, as Jon Henke, my friend and co-founder of The Next Right says, a sense of unifying grievance. The left found theirs in the war, and it more than anything has been responsible for its success. But perhaps more critically, the next logical challenge will be using this new movement we build online not just to unify against a perceived danger but to set forth a positive governing vision for the country -- the people-powered, wikified, 21st century Contract with America.

Thank you.