During six-plus years of blogging, my volunteer research and writing abilities have contributed to the campaign and media efforts of such notable Republicans as George Allen, Mitch McConnell, Rob Portman, Sarah Palin, Michael Steele, and a host of others, too many to mention. That work often becomes a substantive part of the relevant mainstream media coverage, in a manner favoring the Republican candidate, official, or legislator.
In many cases, those efforts came from direct requests from their offices, or campaigns to help out on a volunteer basis over some issue, or news item. So, imagine my surprise when Nick Schaper, Director of New Media for House Minority Leader John Boehner, with apparently no real experience or background in new media at all, would opt to insult and marginalize my blogging efforts on a Republican-based listserv.
Well you can obviously Goggle, I’m already more impressed than when I read your blog for the first time this morning. I’d love to take the bait, it seems like you’ve got plenty of time on your hands. But on second thought- you’re right. This thing is a game changer and is completely emblematic of a lack of vision by the movement on the right that you’re presumably some part of.
The full story of that interaction is here. Last year’s top Right-side blogger, Ace, of Ace of Spades HQ weighed in with some thoughtful analysis here. A subsequent apology from the GOP staffer is here; however, that is relatively meaningless to the larger point. The fact remains, the GOP establishment as a whole takes its more genuine on-line activists for granted, completely fails to support them in any substantive way — and is as likely to insult them through ignorance than show them appreciation during any potential interaction.
Many GOP establishment figures, including those purportedly working in new media, have no serious knowledge, or understanding of the phenomenon of new media at all. Whatever mechanism that effectively binds the Democrat establishment and their on-line activists and bloggers either doesn’t exist on the GOP side, or is seriously broken, if not corrupted by an inside the Beltway mentality. Perhaps one needs a father who donated to a campaign to work in GOP new media today, who knows — judging by the alleged experience of many inside the Beltway, so-called new media professionals on the GOP side.
Does that disconnect and utter lack of support and genuine honest cooperation and cohesion matter? I would submit it does.
Karl Rove is allegedly something of a genius when it comes to Republican political strategy. Yet, after leaving the White House, he said his worst political mistake was in not pushing back against the anti-war Left over the Iraq War.
The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency. The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.
Did anyone from the Right push back? Yes, as a matter of fact. An entire cottage industry of blogging sprung up, first to support the wars after 9/11, and then to push back hard every day against the anti-war Left during the Bush administration because they, not Karl Rove, realized how critical it was. This is both well known and well documented. But evidently, no one in the GOP establishment, including Karl Rove, was listening.
On the eve of the 2004 election, some allegedly damming old documents were made public by Dan Rather and CBS News. It wasn’t the GOP’s brain trust that debunked those documents, precipitating the fall of Dan Rather. It was a number of blogs and blog and news junkies on the web.
Those are just two notable stories of a great many, both large and small, in which political activism by Right-side bloggers either helped GOP officials and organizations, or should have demonstrated the pathway to increased success for them. But such efforts routinely go taken for granted, unappreciated, or completely ignored.
As long as this schism remains, even while GOP officials foolishly brag about some imagined mastery of new media that doesn’t actually exist, except in the minds of Beltway functionaries, the GOP establishment, on-line Right-side political activists, and a more conservative politics that America desperately needs right now will continue to suffer. And, ultimately, the Democrats and liberal establishment will win the new media war in the political arena. As the ultimate losers in that equation will be our current crop of Republican politicians so enthralled with their D.C. echo chamber, perhaps it will be a fitting end, after all.
That comment was an excessively sarcastic response to the Democrats’ pathetic attempts to catch up with our dominance of modern media, and was certainly not intended as a slight to our grassroots friends.