(continuing above with last paragraph)
As an ex-registered Republican, a moderate conservative, I think we really need a strong and responsible Republican Party to provide choice, balance and honest competition. This is not possible with their current mentality and focus, with their loyalty only to a small segment of the American people who greatly benefit from their actions as the majority gets only apathy, the costs and an abundance of subterfuge. It isn???t about conservative versus liberal; it isn???t about single issues used to excite passion and manipulate while they quietly pursue their own agenda; it is about having honesty and a sincere and responsible focus on benefit for all of the people. It is now really up to the voters to diligently see through the deception and to demand better, to never accept the rhetoric offered only to cover the self-indulgence and the rationalized drastic neglect!
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The scene played out at small and large gatherings across the country. In Boston, speakers in Colonial uniforms spoke to a crowd of 500 that had gathered in the historic Common. In Washington, D.C., the National Park Service thwarted protesters gathered in Lafayette Square as they planned to dump 1 million tea bags; the local broadcast media quickly reported that the event's organizers lacked the proper permits. In Hartford, Conn., 3,000 protesters gathered to dump tea, but media outlets couldn't resist pointing out that 40,000 people showed up to a protest just a few years ago when the state first enacted a personal income tax.
Everywhere, the protest message was predictably hazy. Signs supporting gun rights and opposing abortion mixed with those decrying Obama's stimulus package or bailouts for Wall Street firms. The crowds at some rallies embraced the local and national Republicans who showed up. Those at others jeered them as part of the problem. That, of course, is the issue with online organizing. It's hard to maintain message control when that message is being managed by thousands of individuals empowered to run their own shows.
Throughout the day, Kremer's site posted updates from the field. Among the missives was a claim that "the extreme left-wing and reporters for the mainstream media who go to cocktail parties" had been undermining these protests and fudging the numbers of the attendees of events. A legion of conservative commentators have picked up that narrative, Fox News pundit Sean Hannity among them. "Despite the overwhelming turnout in Atlanta and other cities throughout the country, the mainstream media has, for the most part, refused to cover the tea parties," claimed a post on Hannity's blog.
Hannity, of course, has a personal stake in this. The tea-party movement incubated online after CNBC's Rick Santelli exhorted his viewers to revolt against government spending. But then it leaped to TV, specifically to Hannity, who encouraged his viewers to start their own tea parties. He announced that he would be hosting his Wednesday show from the site of Atlanta's party, and that Newt Gingrich would be visiting New York's. The underlying implication was that the Republican establishment was ready to embrace this Net-spawned movement, that it had learned from the errors of an election past.
That's not the way it looks today. A year ago, when the Obama campaign was heralded for harnessing the Internet, social-media experts weren't talking about the millions of Facebook groups, or the myriad tweets and blog posts. Instead, the Dems were praised for having the savvy to turn their online organizing and social-media efforts into a modern, and massive, voter directory. Collecting supporters' data through mybarackobama.com and myriad other efforts, the campaign then disseminated that information to local organizers around the country. If you wanted to be among the first to know who Obama was picking as his running mate, you had to enroll in a text-message program. Later these same numbers were sent a text reminder to vote.
The problem, for tea-party-loving Republicans, is that these innovative strategies weren't the stuff of politicians; they were the work of geeks like Chris Hughes, who left his post as a founder of Facebook to run Obama's Web operations. Hannity and Gingrich may have helped to lure a few hundred more people to the events in Atlanta and New York, and surely drew more traditional-media attention, but their inflated involvement did nothing to turn the tea party's one-day venting into something of lasting value to a party looking to rebuild.
That was the chance the GOP missed on April 15. Instead of looping all the tea-party groups into one database in order to mine that information over the weeks and months to come, the party outsourced the online legwork to an outsider from Atlanta. In lieu of working on how they will keep Wednesday's protestors engaged through 2012, conservatives are arguing over how many showed up. And in place of standing back and reaping the long-term information wealth generated by a predictably chaotic event, party leaders inserted themselves into awkward situations that could make for great attack ads in 2012. For the GOP, none of these things seems worthy of a party.
© 2009
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