 SPECIAL POST-ELECTION ISSUE
Roots of Defeat
Let us study, and emulate, the Left’s online tactics
PATRICK RUFFINI
The four-year ascent of Barack Obama from state senator to president marks not just the triumph of a man, but the coming of age of a movement.
That movement belongs to liberal (or “progressive”) Democrats, who in less than a decade have remade themselves. Once respected only in academia and the news media, they have become a fighting force. They systemically digitized the means of political organization and strategy, with the ultimate goal of dominating the political system — “Crush their spirits!” was Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s pre-election rallying cry.
The Left’s online movement is consciously modeled after the Goldwater-and-Reagan-era conservative movement. To those trying to build the Left, the vast right-wing conspiracy was an object not of scorn, but of admiration. They studied the Right’s network of think tanks, issue groups, and talk-show hosts, looking for clues on how to push a message with brutal efficiency. They took these lessons to heart and shaped them to fit the web. Ironically, today’s Right has much to learn from them.
The Left has created not just a collection of unshaven bloggers but a machine that beat the Right at its own game. The Left’s response to idea mills like the Heritage Foundation and AEI is the Center for American Progress, except that it produces few ideas: A reported 40 percent of its budget is given over to marketing. The tip of the spear is ThinkProgress.org, a site written ostensibly by CAP policy wonks. Its sole function seems to be to discredit conservative candidates and personalities; it contains 11,000 pages with the words “Sarah Palin” on them, according to Google. ThinkProgress entries aren’t all that original, but they frequently serve as jumping-off points for the left-wing blogosphere and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
If ThinkProgress is the framing and messaging arm of the netroots, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall is its resident opposition researcher. When he began blogging eight years ago, Marshall seemed like a classic starving-artist type, bouncing around from freelance gig to freelance gig and blogging in his spare time. But Marshall has become the Left’s most consistently high-performing purveyor of new attack memes against Republicans and conservatives. He has built a small empire — TPM Media employs seven reporter-bloggers, and one former employee landed at ABC News.
Daily Kos’s Moulitsas is in many ways the central fixture of the liberal blog scene, and activism is his main focus. Moulitsas has pushed his many readers — he receives tens of millions of page views a month — to donate to his favorite candidates, usually second-tier liberal challengers to comfortable Republican incumbents. Daily Kos is not merely a platform for liberal views, but an instrument for building political support in and for the Democratic party. “[Daily Kos is] a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory,” wrote Moulitsas in a defining 2004 post. “The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It’s one between establishment and anti-establishment factions.”
The netroots’ early successes were achieved over the opposition of the party establishment and with little support from major donors. But the Democratic fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue changed the game: Any donor could earmark money for specific candidates, and could do so online. The site has now raised nearly $82 million for Democratic candidates, most of them liberal.
Over the years, liberal bloggers have seen numerous victories. Their baptism in the political arena was the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, when the Internet allowed a little-known former Vermont governor to eclipse his more recognizable but milquetoast competitors. The candidate blew it at the eleventh hour, but the experience was instructional. In the ensuing years, a powerful assist from the blogosphere stiffened the spines of traditional Democratic interest groups, which had been ineffective in the first Bush term.
In 2005, Marshall led the liberal blogosphere’s charge against Social Security reform; he posted the names and phone numbers of Democratic politicians who professed openness to private accounts, dubbing them the “faint-hearted faction.” As the phone calls rolled in, the faint-hearted changed their positions one by one. That, coupled with the Republican leadership’s offering only weak-kneed support, dealt a decisive blow to the president’s signature second-term initiative, puncturing his aura of invincibility and presaging the death spiral to come.
In 2006, there was no civil war between the Deaniac netroots, whose leader now headed the Democratic National Committee, and the party establishment. Everyone marched under the banner of the netroots’ in-your-face aggressiveness. YouTube played a decisive role in fanning the flames of George Allen’s verbal foibles — forever enshrining the “macaca moment” — and thus flipped control of the U.S. Senate.
Shortly thereafter came Marshall’s greatest triumph, the result of cobbling together local news accounts of U.S. attorney firings around the country. He wove them into a single narrative about cronyism at the Justice Department that eventually cost Alberto Gonzales his job. It was a story uniquely suited to the Internet: No reporter was covering that beat, and the local articles were accessible to everyone online.
In 2007, out of this vibrant, drama-filled history, came the Obama campaign, which concluded that the Internet could make the difference in an insurgent primary bid against Hillary Clinton. To be sure, the crowds and the gusher of online money would not have materialized without Obama’s charisma. But the campaign came up with brilliant tactics and executed them perfectly, requiring supporters to give their e-mail addresses (for subsequent re-solicitation) to attend rallies, collecting an estimated 3 million cellphone numbers by promising to announce the vice-presidential pick by text message, and hiring an nine-person online video team to craft the candidate’s image on YouTube.
Without Obama’s massive online fundraising haul, the Illinois senator likely would not have had the resources to dominate the ground-game-intensive caucus states that made the difference in his nomination. And though money and tactics alone cannot explain the general-election outcome, the Internet gave Obama the freedom to opt out of public financing, setting up the most one-sided air and ground campaigns in modern presidential politics.
Meanwhile, the Right isn’t even out of the gate in mobilizing money and activists for its candidates outside the traditional party structure. Republicans have replicated the ActBlue technology, but their success has been limited by a distinctly inhospitable environment. Right-of-center bloggers are disinclined to engage in direct activism, and campaign consultants who came of age in the 20th century are reluctant to invest resources in the Internet.
Another problem is that conservative bloggers are there to provide you with their opinion. The new pillars of left-wing media are there to provide you with information, such as that on the U.S. attorney firings. Recognizing that page A1 of any newspaper usually trumps the op-ed page in setting the agenda, these outlets have fashioned themselves as dispensers of information — information usually helpful to the Left and its candidates.
This is because TPM, ThinkProgress, and the Huffington Post are all full-time operations employing reporters, whereas conservative blogs usually run the work of amateur or part-time writers. When conservative bloggers are full-time, they are generally commentators and not reporters.
It goes without saying that Republicans’ problems go far beyond their use — or relative non-use — of technology. The netroots and the Obama campaign succeeded primarily because the Internet is a medium tailor-made for insurgents. But now that Republicans are on the outs at all levels of government, they will need the Internet as a tool of opposition. Failure to grab hold of it could signal a long, long winter to come.
Mr. Ruffini is a Republican political strategist and co-founder of TheNextRight.com.
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