Tag: Netroots

How to Win Any Local Political Campaign Online

buzz-it!

Admittedly I did not apply the philosophy below to my own local elections this year.  But this is the method I followed to help a Progressive Democrat win in Western New York.  The candidate had been posting some things on a site I ran and I noticed his campaign site needed help.

1. Make sure your coding is correct so that the search engines will be able to index your site properly.  Your site should be ready to go before you announce, if not make it a priority ASAP as media articles referring to you will sometimes include links to your site and you don’t want it to look like a mess. Yes a blog is a must.  An events calendar is also very helpful as people feel welcome to join in the fun right away.

2. Post photos of the candidate interacting with people at local events.  At the same time begin advertising the site in every conceivable location, if the site is broken down into issues register those sections of the site with indexes that are related to the topic, register news feeds with aggregate sites and search for local engines and link lists.

Political Positioning: Yelling Louder for Change

There are basically two stances you can take when doing internet activism: You can present well reasoned articulate non-confrontational arguments for your position and hope they get read by someone who matters, and also hope that your well reasoned articulate non-confrontational argument suddenly turns the light bulb on over their head and changes there thinking or their position.

Or

You can YELL!!!

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

The purpose of yelling is not to make the wheels turn in some Congressmember or aides head….it is to scare the holy crap out of them and make them do something or lose votes and money. It is to keep them honest and to keep them from drifting off course.

Birds Flying High, You Know How I Feel…

Lately, I find it more and more difficult to come and talk to you here.  It is hard for me to do so without saying at all times that I feel strongly that we have lost our path, are wandering further and further from it, and that our new route leads only to disaster.  And what is hardest for me is the feeling that many of us are the leaders of our departure.

The crisis before us has been well-recounted, and I do not wish to revisit all of it.  But certain things are absolute: Our constitutional rights have been repeatedly abrogated, violated, and removed by our government.  This same government, of and by the American people, has blatantly and openly committed numerous war crimes, and indeed many candidates for the highest political office in the land openly proclaim that they will continue to commit war crimes should they be elected.  This same government, having collected more taxes than any other in history and spent even more than that, also openly states that it can not and will not account for where billions of those tax dollars have gone.  This same government has led our nation into a war which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and has neither success nor victory in sight, yet as every other nation allied with us is withdrawing, our government has escalated our involvement.

As bloggers, all of us have played an important role in bringing these facts to the American people, who have rightly risen in indignation which crosses all racial, social, political and economic boundaries.  We have played an essential role in highlighting how important these actions by our government, a government which we permit to act in our name based on the premise that we ourselves have formed it by contractual agreement in the Constitution, damage the most fundamental nature of what we ourselves are – a nation of free citizens forming a democratic Republic by choice.

Put simply, a United States of America where the government violates its own laws and treaties to commit war crimes, where tax revenues disappear without the people being told of its use, where the government refuses to allow citizens the right to hear evidence against them and tortures them into giving evidence against themselves is a nation with neither meaning nor significance.  In such a United States, we cease to be citizens and become serfs.

Netroots Go Boom

What a day,

This was all foreshadowed recently on Bill Maher’s show when Kos was speaking of the netroots in the past tense, apparently without even realizing it.  He said that news media wasn’t allowing critical voices to be heard a few years ago which is why DailyKos became so popular but failed to point out the critical work being currently done and did not even mention the future of the netroots.

On a previous media appearance Kos said that anyone who posted photoshopped pictures on his website was an idiot. I figure that ruled out about 35% of the top posters who were now completely ignored as idiots by the guy they were helping to make rich.  Arrogant?  Hell yes.  Self serving?  Ahuh.  

So perhaps we need better leaders.  Perhaps here we need A leader.  Because right now we aren’t accomplishing a hell of a lot.

Did the netroots go boom?

Is it worth salvaging?  Or have our leaders already left us for the country club?

Best Blog Posts Of All Time

Matt Yglesias sparks the retrospective.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Digby on Abraham Lincoln.

Kid Oakland on Being a Fighting Democrat.

Me on Richard Hofstadter, Lincoln, FDR and Obama.

List some of your picks and include one of your own so I look less of an egomaniac.

Fuck this “debate”

So everyone with a blog or a newspaper is writing about the “debate” held tonight by the Democratic candidates for their party’s nomination for President.  But I’m not.  I didn’t watch it.  Sure, I was at work while it was going on, and could not have done so.  But I have been home for several of them, and proudly ignored them.  Because the “debates” are a sham, about little of substance, and won’t make much of a difference anyway.

We can all remember the vast attention paid to the Presidential debates in 2004, as well as many of them previous.  But the “victories” of Kerry over Bush in the debates then did not matter, and no matter how much we venerate the “You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy” moments of debates, debate results don’t matter much, except for in a single area.  The Swift Boat ads trumped whatever success from the debates Kerry had.

The only way that debates matter, particularly in the primaries, is that it can help determine not who any of us will vote for, but who gets major financial supporters.  Because you can blow it by having a terrible debate performance, and the money will not go to a candidate who has blown it.  And you can maybe pick up some money from a surprisingly strong debate showing; Mike Huckabee has finally seen an uptick in donations after repeated “strong” performances in the eyes of the press.

All About The Netroots

One of the biggest problems of the Netroots remains its inability to take criticism. Consider this post from Matt Stoller:

Frank Rich wrote a column called ‘The Good Germans’.  He spends a bunch of column inches lamenting how ‘we’ have let the war go on, and are as complicit as the Germans during the Nazi regime.  Here’s the nub:

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

And yet, last month, here’s Frank Rich.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the “General Betray-Us” headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction.

Rich is operating according to the rules of the media elite.  It’s ok to whine about the problem, but try to do anything about it and you’re getting very much uncivil, sir.

Um Matt, it was not the incivility, it was the stupidity. The Netroots’ problem on Move On, indeed, regarding ANY criticism of the Netroots, is the uncheckable impulse to attack the criticizer instead of considering the point. Matt might be interested to learn that Frank Rich was harshly critical of General Petraeus in repeated columns, including in the very column cited by Stoller.

It so happens that I myself was subject to criticism in a Frank Rich column:

Carrots and Sticks

Credit when due. Criticism when appropriate. Today, credit to Markos:

Pelosi may think it’s a waste of time for us to try and hold our elected officials accountable, but that doesn’t mean we have to listen. They want us to write a check, cast a vote for them, and then shut the f’ up. But we certainly won’t. . . . We’ve got an incredible candidate challenging Wynn in the primary, the impressive Donna Edwards (yeah, I’m smitten). And since the entire Democratic Machine is now arrayed against her, it’ll be up to us to prove that people-power can overcome the morally compromised leadership.

Don’t be smitten though. Pols are pols. Also credit to Chris Bowers:

If there is one line about activism that angers me more than any other, it is the complaint that progressives who target other Democrats are wasting their time and resources doing so. In a much discussed quote this morning, Nancy Pelosi offered up a variation on that line . . . Many writers have commented on this article today, making this anything but a groundbreaking blog post.  . . . Intra-party presidential nomination fights are one of the biggest sectors of the entire political industry. If leading Democrats want to talk about circular firing squads or a misuse of resources by targeting other Democrats, they should talk about the presidential primary first. Even expensive, well-funded primary challenges to sitting House or Senate Democrats would cost less than 5% of the money that is being used in the nomination campaign.

. . . In this circumstance, it seems to be that Pelosi simply doesn’t like the people hanging around her home. In other, more common circumstances, it means that someone simply favors the incumbent in a primary, or opposes the issue position being advocated.

Good post.

Oh God, More Meta: “The Netroots”

It’s a mistake imo to talk about “the netroots” as if it’s a something instead of many things, because it gets thinking about what can be done off on the wrong foot right from the start. It’s like saying “the American citizenry is at a crossroads.” Um, OK, but not particularly useful.

The leftosphere blogs perform five main functions that I can see:

Forming powerful communities is essential to political influence

It is probably going to be difficult to stop the party of complaining about Congress, the media and the political culture generally and move towards a party of organizing a strong disciplined movement towards change. I believe our country needs a strong left, right and center. I believe the center and right show signs of strength and vigor but the left seems to be still weak. This is shown by the way Congress in particular has treated the concerns of the left-progressives even loyal Democrats. Many net-based activists have worked very hard to bring a Democratic majority to Congress and keep the election of 04 close despite and poor campaign strategy (as usual) from the party hacks. The realization that the Democratic Party has little interest in the sorts of concerns voiced in the left-blogosphere seems to have shocked many people. Well, clearly something isn’t working. So what next?

“Tradeoffs For Move On”

Matt Stoller writes:

To party committee leaders like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, the money coming through Moveon and Actblue is nice but no longer necessary.  There’s no reason to make any trade-offs to progressives to get it, unlike the period from 2002-2006 when business lobbyists had no reason to give to Democrats. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) What exactly are Move On and Act Blue pushing for? They have been stunningly quiet on pressing Democrats on Iraq. Oh let me guess, this is about the stupid Move On censure, cuz that is what matters. The Dem Capitulation on Iraq? Not so much.  What a joke.

Iraq: The Failure Of Activist and Netroots Leadership

Chris Bowers writes:

If our vote totals on key pieces of legislation are actually going backward in Congress, then no one in the Democratic field is successfully leading on Iraq in Congress. Good leadership isn’t just about proposing legislation (which all current members of Congress have done), sending out press releases announcing how you will vote beforehand (which a couple of candidates did this time), exhorting your colleagues in Congress to vote a certain way (which at least Dodd has done among current members of Congress running for President), and then casting the right votes (which pretty much everyone does now, even though none of the Senators running for President did so last year). Successful leadership is actually causing the debate to bend in your direction, and gathering support where none previously existed. According to this criteria, when it comes to the impact of the 2008 Presidential field on the Iraq fight in Congress, no one has done that. To varying degrees, they all have tried-or at least made it look like they were trying-but no one has succeeded.

I think that is a fair criteria for all of us. And by that criteria, I think it is fair to say that the leaders of the Netroots have utterly failed. It is ironic that Bowers criticizes people like Chris Dodd (for his post is really a pushback against Dodd’s little surge in the Daily Kos straw poll while his preferred candidate, Bill Richardson, had a meltdown) for their efforts in Congress without even considering his own failures and that of the other leading Netroots lights, like Move On. Interesting use of blinders there. More.

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