Category Archives: Technology


Punditry versus activism; False dichotomy?

Patrick Ruffini, former E-campaign director for the RNC, and Dean Barnett, former driver for Mitt Romney in his 1994 Senate campaign, are debating the relative merits of activism (Ruffini, an activism activist, here and here) and punditry (Barnett, a punditry activist, here and here). I basically agree with Patrick, as my framing should indicate, but […]

Obama using LinkedIn for politics

So I went to accept a LinkedIn invitation. You’ll never guess from who. But, in any case, I get to the screen, and there is Barack Obama asking a question.
This strikes me as a pretty clever way to use LinkedIn. This is a crowd that, if you engage, can probably turn donor. And they are […]

College Republicans encourage YouTube questions

I thought this was an encouraging sign. The College Republican National Committee is encouraging members to engage on YouTube. I don’t recall the College Dems doing this:

The CRNC has started a YouTube group, College Republican Debate Questions, to encourage College Republicans across the country to submit questions for the Republican YouTube debate in November.
Charlie Smith […]

Why “Why not a righty Kos?”?

It seems that every couple of months, there is a discussion about the state of disarray of the righty blogosphere. This time it is mostly a different crowd moving it. Dean Barnett of HughHewitt.com writes, ironically, in the Weekly Standard. But then, in response, we get both Dave Wiegel at Reason and Sh+Sh from Newsbusters. […]

Grasping new tools

As my friends Patrick Ruffini, Rob Bluey, and Justin Hart have pointed out, a bunch of us organized a new media training workshop at Heritage, sponsored by Google, on Wednesday. It was a success. About 200 people attended. It was truly extraordinary.
The goal, more than anything else, was to begin a discussion on how organizations, […]

Dems building national precinct organization?

This is the first thing that the Dems are talking about in 2008 that actually scares me. Mike Dukakis is talking about building a real national precinct organization:
"We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America—all 185,000,” Mr. Dukakis said. “I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. I didn’t do it after the […]

ONE’s activation (update)

Last week, the ONE campaign released some polling about the support that they have. It claimed pretty deep support. I didn’t write on it because who says "no" when asked, "do you want to end international poverty?" Apparently there are a few people who won’t.  These numbers were not surprising to me. Back in 2005, […]

What’s a movement? Do we have one?

Patrick Ruffini wants a "Movement 2.0." While I agree with the sentiment, I want some specifics. Ruffini starts with:

A common thread is that the other shoe won’t likely drop until we have Hillary to unite against. I’d like to pick apart that assumption.
The basic assumption is sound. The online right was ascendant in the […]

YouTube GOP success, several different ways

Eric Pfieffer from the Washington Times says, basically, that the Save the Debate coalition has won:

The majority of Republican presidential candidates are backing off their objections to participating in the unconventional YouTube debate.
Candidates’ reservations about the seriousness of the format, which features videotaped questions from voters, and the original September date are being resolved and […]

What the online left is; Both left and right are wrong

It is amusing to read the stories coming out of YearlyKos. You have Chris Bowers’ "Why the Progressive Movement has stalled." And you have Townhall’s Amanda Carpenter’s "Laptop Liberals Plan Takeover at YearlyKos." Both are realizations that the online left isn’t quite what they thought it was.
The left thought that it was a broad-based movement […]