Hang Right Politics

Posted by Kathy on July 29th, 2007 in GOP, Elections 2008

The debate about the debate on YouTube falls into two positions.

1 - that’s not the type of discourse we should approve. The debates are serious business, about serious issues facing a serious potential president. Did I mention that it was serious?

2 - if we don’t get on board the technology train we limit our ability to compete.

Basically it’s about style over substance. Republicans making the argument that our candidates are above this forum, don’t see the seriousness of that mistake. While debates are indeed serious matters, they are first and foremost a competition.

We should surrender no turf in the competition and that includes YouTube. Patrick Ruffini weighs in:

If our campaign operatives believe the comfortable lie that 95% or more of the action is offline, we will never have the vision or the capacity or the incentive to change. We will never announce our candidacies online. We will never do a Sopranos video. We will never successfully inflict a Macaca moment on a vulnerable Democrat. We will never raise any real money online. We will never build the kind of organically grown lists of 2-3 million that MoveOn or the Kerry campaign or ONE built. We will never have the courage to empower our supporters to power us out the rough patches, as John McCain could easily have done two weeks ago.

We will instead be defensive and afraid of the new world, and that’s no way to win.

What’s the alternative? Simple. You start by setting what business writer Jim Collins calls “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAGs). And then you work tirelessly to meet them. You make the online campaigns matter, in the macro sense of everyone knows that’s where the action is, and that’s where the real decisions are being made. Online, audiences follow content. The progressive Internet was dead until — holy crap! — they were actually organizing, funding candidates, and outwitting the traditional engines of the left. There’s no reason that can’t be true for Republicans. They said we couldn’t do GOTV in rural and suburban areas — until we did it. They said we couldn’t recruit 1.4 million volunteers in 2004 — until we did it. And I’m optimistic that they’ll say we’ll never know how to use the Internet — until we do that too.

If you think this is about snowmen, you are sadly mistaken. These aren’t frivolities. These are the fundamentals. Without fundamentals, we die.

I find myself in my usual corner on this. I prefer substance to style and the substance isn’t the format it’s the outcome. We must stay competitive if we are to win. If the style is offensive, what else is new? Hostile debates have been the norm for decades. Read Ruffini’s post - there’s lots of good information there.