I didn’t watch the debate between the six candidats vying for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. Apparently there was a discussion about the role of the Internet in American politics and what the Republican Party would do to combat the enormous gain the Democrats made in this area in the 2008 election.
According to Eric Etheridge of The New York Times that sparked a laundry listing of how friends each of the candidates had on Facebook and how many followers they had on Twitter. That is a sign, they insinuated, that the Republican Party was in-touch with the many ways to use the Web to enhance political party efforts.
Jason Tolbert of The Tolbert Report actually watched the debate, so perhaps he can weigh in on this. Mr. Etheridge links to a comment by Tim O’Reilly, a print and online publisher, who discusses the real advantages of MyBarackObama.com.
And as you might think, it doesn’t have anything to do with fostering online social communities. It has more to do with the making the mechanics of the campaign stronger: building better voter lists, tracking voters, getting them to donate money, helping them organize and, ultimately, moving them to the polls.
This, Mr. O’Reilly suggests, is much more like online strategy of Wal-Mart and Google, which has a direct correlation to each company’s overall business goals, the efforts of which can actually be tracked and measured.
You are correct. This has become a huge issue in the RNC chairman race. It has almost become a contest on who is the most tech savvy. Saul Anuzis, the MI GOP Chairman, is the founder of a VOIP company and claims to hold this title; he constantly twitters and has a blog called “That’s Saul Folks.” But Saltsman, Steele, and Blackwell certainly discuss it quite a bit as well. I am friends with Chris Maiorana, who is a political web guru; he is the guy Saltsman brought in to run Huckabee’s online presence, so Saltsman is smart enough to understand the importance of investing in this area.
The real story is Republicans know that we got our tails kicked in this area in 2008 and we better figure it out before 2010 is a repeat.
One thing I’ve observed is that liberal websites are more likely to allow dissension than their conservative counterparts. I’ve been kicked off freerepublic twice, once for merely asking how we’re going to balance the budget without someone somewhere paying more taxes. You can reject the premise or answer that question different ways, but to call someone who asks it a troll is not the way you go about organizing people. There is a fundamental conflict between technological evolution and anti-intellectualism.