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 Read more

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 Read more

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 Read more

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 Read more

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. Read more

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 Read more

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 Read more

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 Read more