FreedomWorks: The Conservative MoveOn.org?

The Politico reports that FreedomWorks plans to invest more than $1 million over the next 18 months in order to expand its e-mail list to one million people. The list currently has 142,000 addresses, and FW says it boasts 830,000 members, so this goal is doable.

Indeed, while I dinged FW last month for sloppy writing, its latest e-mail, "Do Green Laws Create Jobs?," was excellent. The subject line was catchy; the text was short, informative, hyperlinked and well-written; and, best of all, the e-mail contained an "embedded" YouTube video.

What's more, FW maintains an official Facebook group, and its Web site, while cluttered, is comprehensive.

To be sure, I think FW's YouTube account is boring, and its blog lacks any bookmarking functions. Yet with the recent hire of Peter Suderman as a blogger and videographer, with Dick Armey at the helm, Chris Kinnan heading up new media and Brendan Steinhauser doing grassroots work, I'm optimistic.

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Find Your Social Media Score

Is your organization ready? Answer these 12 questions.

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Expert Advice on New Media

On socnets, from David All,



On e-mail lists, from Patrick Ruffini:

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Even Bloggers Take Vacations

Sorry for the light posting recently, but I've been very busy this week, and probably won't be blogging until after the holiday.

In the meantime, check out Bluey's write-up of yesterday's new-media seminar at Heritage, which was as insightful as it was inspiring.

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You Have a Blog, You've Watched YouTube Before, You Might Even Have Listened to a Podcast

Now, how do you integrate all this—not to mention embrace things like MySpace and Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us, Flickr, FeedBurner, Site Meter, widgets, Twitter, BlogAds and Google Groups?

Block off the day of August 29 (two weeks from today), and learn the tricks of the trade at the first-ever Modern Media Strategies Workshop. Sponsored by Google and hosted at Heritage, it's free and star-studded; plus, there's a reception afterward at Lounge 201. Details here.

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The Daily Digest

Did Rush Limbaugh plagiarize Matt Lewis?

One of my pet peeves is the importance of tax reform. Dave Weigel points to heartening news in this regard: six of the 11 GOP presidential candidates—Fred Thompson, John McCain, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter and Mike Huckabee—favor the Fair Tax (a 23 percent sales tax), and a seventh (Ron Paul) wants to abolish the IRS.

Are average attacks per day up or down in Iraq? What about coalition fatalities? Or oil production? Or electricity? Using a slew of snazzy charts, the recently overhauled Victory Caucus Web site has the answers.

In 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act became law. The protectionist measure was vigorously opposed by 1,028 of the nation’s top economists, who rightly predicted that the tariffs would devastate the economy. Now, some in Congress are considering ways to enact similar policies, this time against China. Once again, 1,028 of America’s top economists, from all 50 states and top universities, have signed a petition in opposition.

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The Daily Digest

Ayn Rand novels convert young people into libertarians. Departments of Motor Vehicles convert our parents. Dan Mitchell echoes Radley Balko on the urgent need to reform this bureaucratic no-man's-land.

Here's something rare: voluntary transparency in a campaign. To wit: Mike Huckabee has posted audio archives of his blogger conference calls, among other media events, on his Web site.

Christopher Caldwell profiles Ron Paul for the NYTM.

Having been stripped, nearly 40 years ago, of his only tangible responsibility, to oversee the Public Health Service, the surgeon general has little or no authority to coordinate the federal government’s public health activities. His office is routinely politicized, and he reports not to secretary of Health and Human Services, but to the assistant secretary. The result, argues Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council, is that the position "today has become mostly one of a bully pulpit to serve as a federally funded advocate." The solution: abolish the office.

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The Daily Digest

Prepared remarks for George W. Bush, with handwritten corrections, on the podium after he officially opened the remodeled Brady Press Briefing room at the White House

Patrick Ruffini advises politicians how to embrace the Web 2.0: "[C]andidates shouldn't Twitter; they should TwitterGram. They shouldn't blog; they should videoblog. That solves the authenticity dilemma of campaign Web sites—we'll know for sure it's them, in video or voice, delivering a message many times more compelling than plain text."

It's now a cliche that Dick Cheney is the most influential and powerful person ever to hold the office of vice president. The question everyone wants to know but few do: how does he do it? In a fascinating four-part series—the kind of journalism that makes us remember why bloggers need the so-called MSM—the Washington Post "examines Cheney's largely hidden and little-understood role in crafting policies for the War on Terror, the economy and the environment."

Cato's Gene Healy is hard at work on a new book, tentatively titled, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Romance with Executive Power. Nut: "If the public expects the president to solve all national problems, physical or spiritual, the president will seek—or seize—the power necessary to handle that responsibility. As a result, powers that the Constitution leaves to the states or the people increasingly flow to the center, and increasingly become concentrated in the hands of one person."

You know who Mitt Romney is. Now meet his dad, courtesy of a Time cover story from 1959. Related: Jonathan Cohn asks if George Romney would be proud of his son's presidential politicking?

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The Daily Digest

The WSJ documents how different presidential candidates are using Google AdWords. For instance, John McCain buys ads on queries for "president," his name and the names of his main opponents, among other things. Mitt Romney, who employs Google for a "couple hundred" words, which change daily, targets locutions like "Olympics," "health care" and "cutting spending."

Continuing the CEO campaign theme, Jonathan Martin reports that Romney's organizational structure in Iowa—20 full-time staffers, coordinators in most of the state's 99 counties and a group of about 50 "super volunteers"—has virtually locked up the state for him.

The newly renovated White House press room will open on Wednesday. Mike Allen provides a vicarious tour of the new facility and of its storied history.

Check out the Capitolist, an anonymous, uncensored message board for congressional staffers (to post, you must use a computer with a Capitol Hill IP address).

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The Daily Digest

Hott4Hill Featuring Taryn Southern

Emergency eye surgery has forced Jim Gilmore to suspend his presidential campaign.

Social networking for politicos? Check out ePolitico.com, coming soon.

Todd Ziegler identifies and lauds the novelty of Ron Paul's Web site: "Interestingly for the social candidate, his blog doesn’t even allow comments. Instead, it encourages visitors to discuss/interact with the blog content on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook. He seems to deliberately avoid building a community on his own site. Due to this, supporters have no choice but to organize elsewhere. . . . [T]he use of these free tools is done out of necessity. But the strategy here is also very sound: by not giving supporters much to do on his own site he maximizes the amount of noise they make in other venues. It is the perfect approach for an insurgent candidate like Paul."

Speaking of Paul, Wonkette pens a memo to his campaign manager: "There’s no need to have him prance around like John Edwards, obviously, but one good suit (with two pairs of pants, two shirts and three ties) and two $150 pairs of decent dress shoes would go a long way towards making your candidate look less like a vacuum-cleaner repairman." Similarly, Mike Gravel, the Ron Paul of Democrats, who donned khakis and a blazer at his party's last debate, could use a visit from Lisa Butcher and Mica Paris.

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Gotcha! Continued

Via e-mail, Josh Levy of techPresident expresses reservations about my proposal (which I submitted to tP) that politicians use the Internet to catch their opponents in gotcha moments, like reversing or whitewashing their positions.

Josh likens this to “a version of politics that we’re hoping the Web—by giving the voters more control of the political process—will help undo.” He adds, “[W]ithout sacrificing the open Web[,] there appears little we can do to stop it.”

Not wanting to promote “gotcha-ism” is perfectly understandable—and I wholeheartedly share Josh’s hope for less politics-as-usual—but I think the idea that the Internet will “undo” opposition research is like asking rain not to fall.

In his latest column, Tom Friedman observes that the Web’s empowerment of every individual to self-publish puts us all ill at ease, constantly on a possible stage. Unfortunately, the “good” empowerment (say, making government spending more transparent, a la last year’s Coburn-Obama bill) cannot be separated from the “bad.”

Furthermore, while my proposal is admittedly akin to bottom-feeding, I don’t think it constitutes gaming the system. In fact, it behooves candidates today to take advantage of every opportunity the Internet provides—whether it’s bringing together one’s supporters (a la Ron Paul), introducing politics to the apolitical (Obama), or compiling oppo (Richardson’s rival).

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Gotcha!

To both protect oneself and to target one's opponent, David All has proposed "five essential tips for the YouTube campaign trail." His suggestions are groundbreaking and thoughtful, but I'd like to add one more, albeit unrelated to YouTube: Develop software to download your opponent's Web site once a day. You need not download the whole site, but, like a good backup program, only the pages that have changed since the last download.

Savvy readers will point out that Google already caches pages for free. In fact, Google's cache was the source of this gotcha blog post by the Politico's Ben Smith. This method is fine if you know that a change occurred within the past week or so, but if you don't, your only other option is the Wayback Machine, which archives entire sites, but only twice a year.

Hence the aforementioned software. As Ryan Lizza of the New Republic reported yesterday, a rival campaign of Bill Richardson's dug back a month and a half to document a change in the governor's seven-part plan for Iraq. In short, as of May 12, Richardson explicitly supported the Feingold-Reid amendment, which would cut off funds for the war next March. Today, the same page has been scrubbed of such support.

After-the-fact editing, whether of a Web page, a profile of oneself or even the congressional record, is all-too-common. What's new is the increasingly comprehensive ability to play gotcha! This is not a necessarily healthy development—such microscopic scrutiny promotes perfunctory rather than spontaneous campaigning—but it's a fait accompli.

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The Daily Digest

The FEC demonstrates what the federal government can do with new media: check out its new Presidential Campaign Finance map, which aggregates, by state and then zip code, individual contributions to each presidential candidate. (New York and Southern California rank first and second.) Like Microsoft Word, the map is detailed, but in a layered way that is user-friendly. (BTW, the National Science Foundation, another executive-branch agency, also sports a cutting-edge Web site.)

The NYT reviews the lucky few who have parlayed their blogging hobby into a paid profession.

Matt Lewis conjectures why Ron Paul won't shut up about Iraq: "If you're a conservative who supports the president's war, you have nine candidates to choose from. But if you're a conservative who believes that going into Iraq was a mistake, Ron Paul is the only game in town."

Meanwhile, Paul is coming around, finally, if awkwardly, on the importance of sound-bite messaging. "I'm for the individual," he asserts. "I'm not for the government."

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The Daily Digest

Scattered around the Capitol, down closed-off hallways and behind nondescript doors marked only with an "S" or a "H" and a number, lurk one of Congress's closeted perks: private offices, or hideaways, where members can catch some sleep, twist a few legislative arms, and invite an eager-beaver constituent at the end of the day.

Mike Turk, who was recently tapped to lead Fred Thompson's e-team, lauds the federalist credentials of his new boss.

The good old choice-championing Rudy is back (and by "choice," I mean the choices of a free-market economy). According to the WSJ, "He envisions a [health-care] system where neither state regulations nor federal tax law push people into expensive plans rich in benefits. Rather, health insurance should be more like car insurance, he said, where people pay out of pocket for minor repairs and maintenance."

Amnesty International's new Eyes on Darfur Web site "leverages the power of high-resolution satellite imagery to provide unimpeachable evidence of the atrocities being committed in Darfur."

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Fred Thompson Update

Sean Hannity scores an exclusive post-debate interview with Thompson, wherein Thompson announces the creation of his official campaign Web site, ImwithFred.com.

The site, per Patrick Ruffini's insider information, hauled in over an impressive $222K in its first 18 hours.

The Hotline's Shira Toeplitz does her best Chris Cillizza and reports the lowdown on Thompson's Web team. The big hire, as I suspected, is Jon Henke, who will work under the aegis of New Media Strategies.

David All notes that both Henke and his boss, Mike Turk, come from the libertarian wing of the GOP.

Other big gets, courtesy of Stephen Hayes, who's been on the Thompson beat for the Weekly Standard, and Bob Novak: Larry Lindsey, Ken Khachigan, Tim Griffin, Victoria Toensing, Adam Putnam, Mary Matalin and Burson Taylor.

Back to the Web site: Soren Dayton observes that ImwithFred.com includes in its request for your contact information forms for your cell phone, cell phone provider (so the campaign can send you free text messages), and IM screen name. "This is the first glimpse of how they will use technology differently."

However, Justin Hart of MyManMitt.com runs the numbers for the traffic to the top five conservative blogs—Malkin, Instapundit, LFG, Powerline and Captain's Quarters—and concludes that while the reach of the blogosphere is impressive, nothing beats pressing the flesh.

Jennifer Rubin is underwhelmed. Thompson's "'elder statesman' screen persona obscures the fact he is the most inexperienced of the major G.O.P. contenders, with seven dimly remembered years as U.S. Senator, no area of expertise, no executive experience and no major legislative achievements bearing his name. . . . [R]ather than just present himself as the least offensive candidate and mimic the views of the party base, he might do well to embrace the role of the candidate of change and offer a blueprint for Republican innovation and reform."

Update (6/8): Phil Klein thinks that Thompson "is the only Republican candidate capable of unifying the party."

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The Daily Digest

Phillip Wellman, a minor-league manager for the Mississippi Braves, puts Brazilian soccer fans to shame.

To do tomorrow: attend the "The Future of Political Communications: Connecting with Young Voters" conference, at GWU.

Harnessing a day-long exclusive, the NYT peels back the layers behind the most-prized possession on the Internet: how Google search works.

Patrick Ruffini is back, and he hits the ground running. His latest invention, the 2008 Presidential Wire Videowall, "aggregates all the latest YouTube videos about the ‘08 candidates in a full screen total immersion experience."

Cato's Michael Tanner has invited Michael Moore to debate America's health-care system, apropos of Moore's new film, Sicko. Don't hold your breath. (A footnote: Tanner misquotes Time's Richard Corliss, who wrote: "The upside of this populist documentary is that there are no policy wonks, crunching numbers and reducing patients' anguish to sterile statistics. The downside: There are no policy wonks, crunching numbers and saying soberly how much a national health care plan would cost U.S. citizens. In a two-hour movie, Moore could have taken a couple minutes to tote up the expected tab.")

Micah Sifry analyzes the online rise of Ron Paul.

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The Daily Digest

Joe Scarborough has an Imus moment

With a new blog by Marc Ambinder, formerly of the Hotline, the Atlantic Online continues to burgeon wisely (as I predicted).

Dick Armey is guest-blogging at Swampland, though, like most old-timers, he hasn't yet realized the importance of hyperlinking.

Another senator has placed a secret hold on legislation to increase transparency—specifically, electronic disclosure of Senate campaign finance reports—but Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, preferring darkness to sunlight, won't say who. Check out What's McConnell Hiding?.com.

Fred Thompson launches his official Web site, while Ron Paul revamps his.

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The Daily Digest

Want to distinguish a libertarian from a conservative? Ask about corporate welfare, which is charity not to poor people but to Big Business. Republicans usually support it, but libertarians oppose it. Cato's Stephen Slivinski documents the reasons why in a new study, "The Corporate Welfare State: How the Federal Government Subsidizes U.S. Businesses."

The NYT's David Kirkpatrick investigates Mitt Romney's vaunted venture capital career. What's surprising is not Romney's use of leveraged buyouts, or that he was more a deal-maker than a manager, but the utter lack of shadiness that I suspect others who have achieved Romeny's level of success have dabbled in.

Social media is changing the way we communicate. Is your company ready for the challenge? Take a test (it's short), courtesy of Ogilvy.

John Judis deduces that Chuck Hagel's impassioned opposition to the Iraq war derives from his repressed silence about Vietnam, in which he served and after which he remained regrettably patriotic.

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The Daily Digest

Rosie O'Donnell vs. Elisabeth Hasselbeck

You've heard of book reviews. Now get ready for Web site reviews. Alan Rosenblatt of techPresident reviews Bill Richardson's, a redesigned version of which the candidate unveiled concurrent with his official, presidential announcement. Rosenblatt's verdict: the site is "clearly good and potentially great."

Rudy's position on Roe v. Wade may be "perfectly reasonable," as Charles Krauthammer argues, but John Dickerson points out the difference between being pro-choice and very pro-choice (my links): "He supported public funding for abortion in New York, made donations to Planned Parenthood, and backed partial-birth abortions."

Considering that the name "Jerry Falwell" probably raised far more money for the left than for the right, liberals may come to mourn Falwell's death. John Pitney explains: "[H]is name remained a fixture in liberal speeches and fund-raising letters long after his actual power had shrunk. When he endorsed school choice and opposed abortion, liberals cited his position as a reason for taking the other side. When he supported Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, Senator John Kerry mentioned him and other conservatives in a floor speech: 'This right-wing reaction can only mean one thing: They know what kinds of opinions Judge Alito will issue in line with their extreme ideology.'"

Steve Chapman explains why Monica Goodling's recent congressional testimony was so appalling: "Considered in the most flattering light, the [U.S. Attorney] firings showed a process that was sloppy, amateurish and poorly informed, with no one in charge and no one responsible for the ultimate decisions. At worst, it revealed a highly politicized atmosphere that elevated partisan goals above fuddy-duddy concerns like honest law enforcement."

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The Daily Digest

Whatever happened to Ward Churchill, the professor who analogized the victims of 9/11 to Nazis? Last week, a five-member panel representing the University of Colorado Faculty Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure voted 3-2 for the chickens to come (half-way) home to roost, and that Churchill be suspended rather than fired.

James Antle puts his finger on why religionists should practice toleration rather than resorting to regulation: "[F]aith depends on a choice: the choice to receive salvation by accepting Jesus Christ. The most important thing evangelicals believe God asks of them—in their view, the most important thing of all—is something they must choose freely. For evangelicals, God does not coerce people into being saved and accepts their decision in the matter as final."

Tim Carney continues to expose the unholy alliance between big business and big government: "Taxes are too complex for the good of the economy, too complex for families, and too complex for small businesses. For big business and for Washington lobbyists, complexity means profit."

If you're one of the 700,000-plus people who have viewed the John McCain "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" video, you'll want to read Michael Scherer's expose on how this little-noticed ditty wormed its way into the nightly news on each major television network. If none of this rings a bell, read Scherer's piece to understand the relationship between opposition-research peddlers and their receivers on the Web.

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