Posted on 09/19/2009 12:49:57 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Erik Telford remembers all too vividly the dark cloud hanging over him on 5 November 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. For the internet strategist at the rightwing campaign group Americans for Prosperity, election night was a double disaster. Not only had Obama won the votes, he had outwitted his Republican opponents in his use of new media tricks such as email recruiting and social networking.
"The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary," Telford says.
That cloud hung over the conservative movement for many weeks. A sense of crisis set in, he recalls, with bloggers, strategists and Republican politicians scrambling in different directions.
"There was a real lack of leadership, a lot of confusion."
But then, almost imperceptibly, something started to happen.
--snip--
For Telford, though, dismissing the eruption as extremist or racist was to miss the point. For him, the 9/12 rally marked the moment at which conservative America finally embraced the new world and recovered its confidence. He believes the movement is now close to catching up with the Democrats in terms of internet savviness; in some ways he contends it has even surpassed them, particularly on Twitter, where much of the heavy lifting behind the so-called "tea parties" against Obama's tax and other policies is being done.(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Y so socialist?
I enjoy reading the British papers covering our issues and politics.
Republican steals 0bama’s internet tactics? How? By collecting information of everybody who visit their website without telling the visitors?
If anyone is a member of freedomworks, please notify them that their join-up and contact pages are not encrypted. I don’t put my personal information on any unsecured page. Not because of the government putting me on a list (too late for that) but others.
This article is very interesting considering the Guardian is a very left leaning newspaper. The left is very worried now.
Libertarians and conservatives aren't using the Internet to organize in the same manner that the Bolshies did last year. All sides are leveraging the Internet, yes. But fittingly, the left's method relied on centralization. It was a top-down affair: meetups and rallies were planned and organized from the top-down. The party machine was involved at every stage.
On the right, this is simply not the case. Santelli ignited a spark that was distributed and magnified via the Internet. The original day of tea parties was highly-decentralized and 9/12 was remarkably decentralized and ad hoc. There still isn't an accurate count of just how many towns saw protests that day or on 9/12. Individuals just bloody showed up. Individuals chartered their own buses. It was pretty damned interesting to see how huge it was, despite the lack of central planning.
We were also wounded because we had a spineless RINO in Juan McCain and his campaign manager was a Democrat. A real receipe for victory there.
obama couldn’t invent his ass, much less “internet tricks”...besides, we all know that algore invented the internet, don’t we?
Brit newspapers cover American politics much better than Yank papers do.
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