Ruffini Re-Visits

Patrick Ruffini re-visits the topic of Right-leaning bloggers as a potential political force:

Riehl brings up a point I hear quite a lot:

How is it I am supposed to get all fired up about raising money for a GOP that hasn't really looked conservative and perhaps not even worth supporting for a number of years? People will blog AND raise money for things they believe in. Maybe if more Conservative and center-Right bloggers started to believe in the GOP, again - it wouldn't be such a difficult thing to do?

It's a good question, but ultimately a straw man. No one is talking about the right blogs becoming a cheering section for the GOP. This is not what the netroots are to the Dems. What I think I'm talking about is a rightroots that is an independent political force to change the GOP.

Patrick goes on to talk about blogs, not as an arm of the GOP, but as an independent force. I agree with him completely on that. But his leaving out my second point suggests, to me, my argument is no straw man at all. Below is the gist of the second point I touched on yesterday from a post of mine in 2006.

You can romanticize the Netroots as a from the ground up grassroots initiative all you want. But it simply isn't true. Liberals and liberal groups with money seeded the thing. Kos and Armstrong penned Crashing the Gate after a consulting contract with the SEIU. You think it's a coincidence that it was even criticized by some on the Left for being too labor-centric coming just after Andy Stern helped pay their bills?

Greenwald's books were published by a left leaning house. On the conservative side, the only group with resources that is really playing at all is the GOP. And they don't even support a significant number of blogs with ad buys. The Left did that, the Right hasn't. And without that underlying infrastructure I'm unconvinced the thing can succeed. I agree with Patrick that ideally it shouldn't be the GOP. But right now the money on the Right flows to places like NRO, AmSpec and others. They might serve a purpose, but they are not blogs and never will be as far as activism goes.

The paper trail documents how the so-called people powered movement isn't so much people powered at all. It's fueled by big money with a big agenda being funneled into the Liberal blogosphere and to Liberal bloggers on a regular basis. Without that support, the grass-roots movement and Dailykos probably wouldn't amount to much of anything and Yearlykos couldn't have taken place on the scale it did.

To understand the financial connections that can now be documented, you'll also want to understand the Phoenix Group (PG), as reported on here in The Hill, and in depth through the New York Times, Wiring the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, July 2004. Wealthy associates of the group have been propping up the Netroots movement, enjoying the cachet of a ground up grass roots movement that's actually financed and, I'd argue, controlled from the top down by big money, just as is most all contemporary politics. The Times piece is an absolute must read.

Comments

[IslamoLlama]

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y49/pspauld/BlogPix/McCainD-AZ.jpg

!!!

[IslamoLlama]

It's a conspiracy! It's a conspiracy! There is no grass roots movement! There are no liberals! It's all a trick!

[gimmeabreak]

Speaking of Phoenix, looks like gramps stands a good chance of losing Arizona.

[IslamoLlama]

How to win friends and influence people, McCain style:

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/articles/2008/10/28/news/local_news/doc49068f6ccce49245010961.txt

"-- Audience members escorted out of Sen. John McCain’s, R-Ariz., campaign event in Cedar Falls questioned why they were asked to leave Sunday’s rally even though they were not protesting.

David Zarifis, director of public safety for the University of Northern Iowa, said McCain staffers requested UNI police assist in escorting out “about four or five” people from the rally prior to McCain’s speech.

...

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.”

Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.

“I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said ‘Why are you crying? and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’” Elborno said. “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.” --"

LOLS! Hope that early voting was big in Iowa.

[tim maguire]

To a fair degree, the netroots ARE a cheering section for the Democratic party. The Republican Party needs to rebuild itself--its farm teams, its think tanks. From the bottom up and that is where a RightRoots would come in handy.

Right now I can't say with any certainty what the Republican party is or stands for. I'm still voting for McCain, but it's more of a vote against Obama.

[MarkJ]

gimmeabreak,

"Speaking of Phoenix, looks like gramps stands a good chance of losing Arizona."

Yeah, and you stand a good chance of losing your soul.

[hdtv]

hmm, AZ has tightened up. It could happen.