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GOP: the next generation; Can these online pioneers drag their party into the future?

Campaigns & Elections, Jan, 2008 by Walter Alarkon

The Republican YouTube debate pleased few people more than David All. A 28-year-old former Senate Republican aide, All and a handful of other tech-savvy conservatives created SavetheDebate.com to urge Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani to drop their objections to the debate's format and take part. When all the major GOP candidates finally took the stage in November, 4.5 million people tuned in--the largest audience of any debate up to that point.

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All, who owns a new media consulting shop, The David All Group, flew down from Washington to Florida to watch the debate in person. Afterward, he posted video on his blog, along with photos of himself in the spin room with other bloggers, Rep. Duncan Hunter and Chuck Norris. His Twitter message read, "Best debate yet--GOP or Dem." He changed his Facebook profile photo to one of him opening his dress shirt and sticking his chest out, Superman-like, to reveal a YouTube T-shirt.

Just getting the GOP candidates to the YouTube debate was an important victory for the technology wing of the Republican Party. But the fact that it was such a struggle laid bare the skepticism that some Republicans still have about the Internet--a resistance that worries the group of young conservatives looking for the best tools to take on Democrats in the 21st century.

"It's like the idea of an advance crew visiting new planets," says All, a fast-talking, laptop-toting Ohio native eager to spread his ideas about the Web. "When it comes to modern media, you're going to have a small 'away team' sent down to scout out the new terrain, to make sure it's not hostile territory. The first crew takes a risk for a larger landing party, and finally the entire crew, who beam down once they know the planet is safe."

In All's analogy, he and other tech-minded Republicans are the small advance crew, the Republican presidential field is the larger landing party, and the rest of the GOP, he hopes, will eventually join them.

The risk-taking advance party includes All, plus Patrick Ruffini, President Bush's 2004 campaign Web director; Robert Bluey, the Heritage Foundation's Web guru; and Erick Erickson, editor of the conservative community blog RedState.com. They hope to introduce Republicans to new tactics, although they're not talking about revolutionizing the party.

After all, they're conservatives, the side built on respect for tradition. Instead, they want to nudge Republicans carefully in the right direction so that they use more of the tools available to them. The tricky thing is that each of them has their own idea of the right direction, and no one's quite sure what the terrain will look like by the time they get to their destination. It could even be that the online world won't live up to its billing.

"At the risk of my own job security, the jury is still out on whether or not the Internet is going to be the silver bullet," says Cyrus Krohn, eCampaign director for the Republican National Committee. "For all of the success stories we've heard since the advent of the Internet, show me one significant victory and I'll eat crow."

The Way Forward

Of course, conservatives aren't totally absent in the online world. They have their own blogs--InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs--that are as strident and nearly as widely read as the liberal DailyKos. And they also get their message out through news sites like The Drudge Report and News-Max. But there's no Right-wing version of MoveOn.org, the non-profit advocacy group with the clout and coffers to shape the debate (as it did last summer with its controversial "General Betray Us" ad). And there's no successful conservative ActBlue, the Web site through which Democratic activists have donated more than $32 million to their candidates across the country.

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So what's the plan for pushing conservative political action into the Internet age? One approach is to do what the Left does, but do it better. In press releases, All says his site is more innovative than ActBlue, since it gives candidates and supporters more control over its pages.

And like MoveOn, Erickson's RedState has started sending out "action e-mails," urging conservative activists to phone their congressional representatives about particular votes. The first, sent out last October, called on members to oppose the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Of course, MoveOn's e-mail list is 3.5 million strong; RedState's has only about 2,000 addresses.

Still, Erickson says even small innovations like these are happening because the party is hurting now, just as the challenging environment of the early 1990s led to GOP innovations. In fact, Web activism tools that Democrats use now--blast e-mails, blogs, online fundraising--came of age when Republicans were trying to undermine President Bill Clinton. Erickson recalls how protests against the Clinton administration often grew out of posts on the conservative site Free Republic, which was cutting edge back then. "When the Left needed to get organized, they had, number one, the anger from 2000 and, number two, the tools that the Right did not have when they got organized." If the Right was out of power six years ago, they would have been the ones to develop the Web tools most effective today, just as they developed talk radio in the 1990s and direct mail in the 1970s, according to Erickson's logic.

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GOP: the next generation; Can these online pioneers drag their party into the future?

Campaigns & Elections, Jan, 2008 by Walter Alarkon

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