Innovation

Throughout the nation, people from all walks of life seem to share a general sense of unease about the future direction of our country and of our society’s seeming inability to solve the major challenges facing it. There is something beyond any single legislative debate, something more fundamental than any particular policy issue. Regardless of one’s party affiliation (or lack thereof), all increasingly share this sense that our nation has reached an important turning point.

For too many years, government has been responding to a seemingly endless chain of crises that have created an ad hoc patchwork of short-term fixes and lost opportunities. Once venerated public institutions, like dominos in a line, have repeatedly betrayed the public’s trust.

As the challenges continue to mount, this is a moment that demands a government dedicated to data-driven solutions – where the best ideas are free to prosper and where people of good faith can innovate together. We must enthusiastically engage the public’s creativity, imagination and expertise in increasingly meaningful experiences that directly impact the democratic process.

Let us respond to America’s challenges as Americans – united around a shared commitment to finding the best ideas, working together to build a better future for our country. The sacrifices that have made this nation possible demand nothing less.

Ultimately, greatness is a choice and it is a choice that each of us has to make – what will we do to make the future a better place? A country’s fate is the sum of individual choices, and so does the fate of our country rest with each of us, every day.

Something is happening in America – throughout the country, people are answering this challenge. They are entrepreneurs and oddballs tinkering with new ideas, willing to commit intellectual heresy and demand a better way; they are emblematic of America’s innovative culture that has always been the foundation for our nation’s success.

Let us move together to a new era of solutions, based on answering today’s challenges and not yesterday’s memories.

 Matt Lira currently serves as the Director of New Media for House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.

They’re getting comfortable. As Henke alludes to here, the self-satisfaction that comes with being in control was a primary factor in the waning of GOP power after 2002. The Dems know political power is nothing if not entropic. That’s exactly why the leadership is rushing like hell to do what they can to entrench their power and fundamentally alter the economy (i.e. before things start to burn and the people turn). Having mastered both the blame game and the art of sophistry, they think they’re better and smarter—despite all the linear thinking and pseudo-intellectual fervor. But victory has a half-life.

What is the Right to do? Let the Left languish in their smugness. Let's innovate: 

1. Get better organized and unified. (Includes networking and collaboration.)
2. Convert talk radio listeners into givers and doers. (Need help from the jocks.)
3. Focus on popular messages of freedom, prosperity and suspicion of government.
4. Create new constituencies resistant to government takeovers of their sector.
5. Create media markets to further dilute the leftish MSM. Hasten the destruction of print.
6. Tap, activate and integrate existing grassroots networks while creating new ones.
7. Use mockery and satire to prick the Obama bubble. “What were we thinking?”
8. Redirect resources from policy wonks to message-makers, writers and activists.
9. Find and exploit joints and weak-points. (Attack from the side. A distracting swarm is better than a standing army.)
10. Develop an “operating system” for distributed activism. “Embrace and extend” the left’s successful methodologies.
11. Crowdsource investigation of key leaders. Dig Relentlessly.
12. Use technology as a means to 5 primary ends—registering voters, organizing activists, changing minds, increasing transparency and crowdsourcing ideas.
13. Make a continuous show out of dissatisfaction. Be creative. Create distractions.
14. Plan carefully, but execute rapidly. Make media. Explosive media campaigns should make people do a double-take.
15. Rebrand as a new breed with new ideas. (Use veterans/old guard sparingly.) Think: New Labour circa 1996.
16. Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.
17. Create alternative funding channels, including micro-donations.
18. Invite in a million ideas and create a filtration mechanism for the best ones.
19. Take risks with policy messages and critiques. Simple and powerful.
20. More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

When you’re clinging to power and pushing your agenda, it’s hard to keep tabs on the enemy. It’s hard to continue innovating now that your foot-shoulders spend most of their days doe-eyed before O-TV, or making snarky comments on rightwing blogs. In 2008, the Left took all the best aspects of the free market – distributed systems, decentralization, collaboration and voluntary association – and out-organized the Right. Disillusionment with the war and the Obama emotion-bubble helped too. But those will soon fade. It’s time to turn the tables.

To be sure, the Left’s leadership will be busy tearing down what is right and good about the U.S., building up what is wrong and adding to a network of special interests and dependents whom they honestly believe will keep them around forever. They’ll make a good go of it. But take heart: Ireland, New Zealand and Britain all rebounded from the depths of socialism and its crony-capitalist variants. Ireland is now economically freer than the U.S. So is New Zealand. Britain is currently moving right. So there is hope. Let’s start innovating.

In my last installment of “No Risk, No Reward,” I suggested 5 risky policy changes for the GOP. Remember, you’re not selling plausibility of passage in Congress. You’re selling bold ideas and, by contrast, setting up the party-in-power as sclerotic, bloated, elitist and bureaucratic (all of which is true). Perhaps one of these reforms, like entitlement reform in the 1990s, will even take. Here are 5 more, as promised.

6. Healthcare “1,2,3”

1-Medical savings accounts for every American –  Give every American the option to divert part or all of their Medicare portion of payroll taxes to a medical savings account (aka HSA). These interest-gaining accounts can be used for out-of-pocket medical care and high deductibles. Mitigates the expense account effect running up the costs of healthcare and pulls us back from the cliff (See Singapore).

2-Refundable Tax Credits for the poor (straight into your MSA). Perhaps we can “afford” to help the poor, but not the way we’re doing it. Means-test people and give poor folks refundable tax credits on a sliding scale. They put these resources into their HSAs and choose where their healthcare dollars go.

3-Kill State Monopolies - Let people buy less expensive insurance across state lines. If I can cut my insurance premium in half by buying in Idaho, I should be able to. The only thing that prevents me from doing so is government. Let’s end that bullshit.

7. Dollar-for-Dollar Schools – Create the conditions for the emergence of creative new private, non-profit schools by allowing people to deduct a portion of the tuition to place their kids in these innovative schools. (Then, perhaps this will happen.)  If you’re taking a full pupil out of the DMV-style school but leaving a large portion of the tax money for said pupil, no one can credibly argue that it “takes resources from the public schools.”  Add refundable tax credits for the very poor and you’ve got a viable alternative to the mediocre-at-best public schools system. Universal primary school is maintained. Competition and iterative innovation radically improves our kids’ education. Everybody’s happy (except the teachers’ cartel, uh, union).

8. Congressional Crowdsourcing - Public solutions for public problems means big-dollar contests and public suggestion-box-type efforts can get the best ideas out of the American people. Bureaucrats have terrible incentives. And seriously, there are no Steve Jobs(s) in Congress. Congresspeople and their staffers should find ways to let the "wisdom of crowds" – even ideas futures markets - solve genuine public problems. Who ever heard of an innovative populist meritocracy? Well, now you have.

9. 1% Rule – For every dollar a federal department saves taxpayers relative to a reasonable budget baseline, those employees get 1 percent of that savings directly in their paychecks (according to pay grade). This would encourage bottom-up departmental efforts to tighten up. To prevent artificially bloating budgets the following years in order falsely to reward these functionaries, you’d have to set up the baseline to avoid political gaming of the system. Such may only be possible with a TABOR-like provision. I agree that the devil would be in the details. Just tossin' it out there.

10. Toleration – I have written elsewhere that the GOP should replace the social conservative policy leg of their tripod with a leg of toleration. Toleration is the cultural institution that means conservatives have their own private social conservatism and let others have their own lifestyles, religious beliefs, or whatever as they see fit. The kids today are much more tolerant and you won’t get anywhere with them unless you let go of all the stuff that smacks of theocracy or social engineering a la Falwell. Persuasion and privacy on social issues is preferable to power.(Here are 1-5)

(Note re: this post by Yglesias. Technology contests for CO2 sequestration would cost Americans this much-$. Carbon taxes would cost this much--$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Yes, subsidizing carbon sequestration technologies requires tax money. But there are differences of degree and differences of kind. I’m afraid Yglesias's criticism conflates the two. Spending this much ($) versus orders of magnitude more means throwing alarmists a bone, while not continuing to bankrupt the country. Clearly, the case of anthropogenic climate change is losing ground rapidly. But even if it weren't, not one person yet has made the case that these taxes, subsidies and green boondoggles would have any appreciable effect on emissions (or mitigation). Though they are clearly corporate welfare opportunities, which the Obama Administration looooooves.)

Dear Republican Party,

So you lost. And it must have been especially painful, being the party of free markets and creative destruction that you are, that the forces behind your failure was your reluctance to innovate.

Conservative success up until this point has been on the basis of innovation. In the 70s great conservative thinkers put forth their sound rebukes of Nixon-style corruption and Carter-style stagflation under the pretense limited government. By the time Communism was collapsing and the failure of central planning was most obvious, your view of American Exceptionalism seemed self-evident.

But when George Bush came into power he ignored the new context of the 21st century. Instead of innovating where change was necessarily, like with Finance, Health Care or Education Reform, ill-conceived tax cuts and an all out war on terror were the path chosen. This was fundamentally a problem of nostalgia. The enemy was not as clear cut as Communism was. And globalization made American Exceptionalism unsustainable in its current form.

Then came the 2006 elections. The Democrats innovated with an anti-war message. They won. In 2008 the Democrats innovated with the promise of universal health care, ending the war, confronting climate change, and fighting corporate excess. They won.

All the while your Republican message floundered. It argued to stay the course, that the economy was fundamentally strong, that the environment didn't much matter, and that social conservatism could survive in the 21st century.

It is no surprise that as the world secularizes social conservatism seems more and more absurd. It is no surprise that limited government loses its appeal when private fraud is rampant. The Democrats won because they stayed competitive and innovated on what were all the biggest issues. The painful thing was that Republicans weren't out of ideas. On education alone you had dozens of innovative ideas like vouchers that could have revolutionized the quality of American public schools yet were never implement.

What's the lesson to be learned from this? If you want to win again, Republican Party, you're going to have to literally renew itself -- creative destruction applied to ideology. Social Conservatives will have to back off. Foreign Policy hawks will have to become more pragmatic. Science and rationality should be favored over faith and tradition. The environment must be priority. Supply Siders must align themselves with the middle class instead of Wall Street. Civil liberty must be seen as just as important as economic liberty. And a more youthful leadership must resist special interest and tackle corporate welfare.

And a note on wasteful spending: Earmark reform is going to be necessary, but it a go-no-where argument when A. Obama is for it too, B. Earmarks account for so little of what is spent, and C. you're just as guilty in its abuse. No one is going to take your anti-spending message seriously after Bush.

These changes are going to happen eventually but if you try first to revert back to the supposed ideal of Reagan Conservatism your party will only continue to sink. I'm not asking you to move towards the center, just into the new century. It's time to find something new.

Sincerely,

Samuel Hammond

Today, the Republican National Committee held a “Tech Summit” to discuss how our party can best modernize its operations – anybody with a passion for technology and politics was welcome to attend. Let there be no doubt, the RNC Tech Summit was something special.

The atmosphere was rich with that almost mystic combination of creativity, technical skill, and a passion for new ideas. Looking around, one could see political veterans and rookies alike – individuals with different specialties, experiences and perspectives collaborating on a shared challenge. How can we best move our party forward?

The greatest innovations are the result of unplanned collaborations and today was no exception – the long-term legacy of today’s event will be those associations fostered within the crowd. Side conversations. Chance meetings. In the months and years ahead, we will see countless projects that trace their origins to conversations in that room.

This is the generational opportunity for the Republican Party – the tools may change, but the challenge remains the same as it has always been. We must utilize technology to genuinely include the American People in the political process in new and profoundly meaningful ways.

As we explore that great opportunity, the verdict on today’s event is clear; without question, the Republican Party is stronger for it.

Matt Lira currently serves as the Director of New Media for House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.

The political blogosphere is buzzing about Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s interview. Soren Dayton argues the lessons of the Obama campaign were “budgeting, technology, field, and media,” while Patrick Ruffini finds that the important lesson is that “Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign.” Although it is quite true that these are some critical lessons, as a business nerd and student at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, I think there’s a massive lesson that pundits are missing: Obama for President wasn’t run like a traditional campaign, but instead like a huge corporation. I don’t believe that any campaign on this level was ever able to accomplish this with nearly the same success as Plouffe and company.

Plouffe makes this unmistakenably clear throughout his interview:

There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. … We had over 5,000 employees… And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.

What specific trends that the most successful modern corporations employ were echoed by the Obama campaign?

1. “Know your customer.” I’ve probably heard this from my entrepreneurship advisor a thousand times now, but only because it is perhaps the single most important phrase in business. Obama’s campaign really knew its customers – just look at the way it outreached to young voters.
2. A consistent message and high-impact branding. These two go hand in hand. Take Apple, a highly successful company even despite the recession, for example: they have a simple but highly memorable logo, effective messaging (i.e. “Get a Mac” ads), and a well-designed and innovative website. Barack Obama’s branding and messaging was as good as any corporation.
3. Job performance measurement and personal accountability. Think quarterly or annual reviews at your place of work. As quoted earlier, Plouffe confirms the importance of this in the Obama campaign: “Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.”
4. Fiscal accountability. Successful corporations have very specific budgets, and virtually all spending is highly scrutinized. Plouffe notes that, “People on the campaign could not make more than a certain amount—$12,000 a month… If you were a deputy you got paid X, if you were an assistant, you got paid Y… From a fiscal management standpoint, Obama was very clear that he did not want to end up with a debt in the primary or the general, so we just planned accordingly. We didn’t spend beyond our means.” (emphasis added)
5. A willingness to take significant financial risks and depart with the norm to be on the cutting-edge. This sentiment was echoed by the Obama campaign at many levels. Team Obama got the idea of peer production, which is quickly becoming the premiere business model of leading corporations like IBM, Boeing, BMW, and Goldcorp. In addition, as Patrick and Soren point out, Obama invested the campaign’s resources in a very unique way – remember the advertisements the campaign ran on an Xbox 360 racing game?
6. A corporate infrastructure. Since when does a political campaign have both a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a new media director – let alone a Chief [Anything] Officer?

In business, constant innovation is crucial. Fall behind and your competitors will likely crush you. Find a decisive edge and you stand to profit immensely. Plouffe’s comments and the results of the election demonstrate that business and politics are actually two very similar animals.

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.