Patrick Ruffini

GOP Revival: There's An App for That

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:30 -0800

What Ramesh Ponnuru has written about Tuesday's wins is right in so many ways:

More important, a few Republican candidates have demonstrated that it is possible to transcend the party's conservative-moderate divide. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell won a landslide — the first Republican win in a governor's race there in 12 years — by running as a problem solver. Social conservatives know he is one of them. But independent voters strongly backed him too. Voters as a whole trusted him more than his Democratic opponent on everything from fixing the roads to strengthening the economy. Once he had that trust, Democrats were unable to get voters to see him as frighteningly conservative, although they tried to make hay out of a hard-right master's thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989.

[Disclosure: I consulted for the McDonnell campaign, and these are my personal views on why he won.]

In the wake of McDonnell's landslide, many observers have pointed to his brand of "pragmatism" to make the case that McDonnell -- and not Hoffman in NY-23 -- is the way forward for conservatives in 2010.

But to point to McDonnell as a subrosa moderate profoundly misses the point. McDonnell is a strong conservative who early in the campaign put Deeds on the defensive by running against Obama and Pelosi's policies, most notably card check and cap-and-trade. There was never any doubt as to McDonnell's conservative bona fides.

But even though McDonnell was in fact a true conservative, there was no need to make the election about those credentials. McDonnell's conservatism spoke for itself.

What the campaign keyed in on very early is that most voters aren't ideological. In a time of crisis, they first and foremost want problems solved -- and specifically, the problems created by too much government meddling and taxes to go away.

Wait, not ideological? So Ruffini's saying we need to run moderates? No. That is precisely the opposite of what I am saying.

Because very few independents care about ideological name-checks, they won't be swayed by scare tactics trying to persuade them that Candidate X is the ideological second-coming of Attila the Hun. We saw this with the thesis attacks. Candidates have wide latitude to run as who they actually are, so long as they can persuade voters they'll deal with the bread and butter issues (which was McDonnell's calling card).

In a purple state like Virginia, you can win by running as a liberal and a problem-solver (Kaine), as a moderate and a problem-solver (Warner), and as a strong conservative and a problem-solver (McDonnell).

Faced with that choice, why wouldn't we choose to run the conservative every time? A non-ideological electorate gives us more leeway to run conservatives in blueish/purple states, not less. To get a flavor of this in action, just look at the closing slide of McDonnell's ads:

The ubiquitous "Jobs Governor" branding and the spinning icons highlighting different issues is evocative of the desire for practical, clickable solutions to everyday problems shown in another recent marketing campaign.

Fixing Northern Virginia traffic? There's an app for that.

Jobs? There's an app for that.

Education? There's an app for that.

Essentially, whatever the issue was, Bob McDonnell wanted you he had the proverbial "app for that" -- a set of practical solutions not overtly branded as left, center, or right.

Considering the issue void that was the Creigh Deeds campaign, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Republicans in Virginia have struggled to make their prescriptions relevant to swing voters. Our issues in local elections have traditionally been issues like taxes and immigration that don't always lend themselves to policy heft. And a lack of policy heft has translated into an intangible sense that there's not enough "there there."

This was the central challenge facing the McDonnell campaign at its outset, and so it systematically sought to dismantle this critique by branding McDonnell as a practical problem solver without compromising his conservative principles.

Republicans can be specific, detailed, and confident in putting forward solutions relevant to the middle class, while also being more conservative than we have been in recent years (especially with the Bush era spending binge). There's not an either/or tradeoff between conservatism and a policy focus, something the McDonnell campaign proved in Virginia this year.

The lesson of the McDonnell campaign: Maintain your conservative principles, but make the election about policy. And whatever the issue, make sure you've got an app for that.

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NY-23 Across America

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:53:05 -0700

What follows may be akin to one of those crazy ideas Dick Morris used to come up with in the Clinton White House, only one in ten of which turned out to be workable -- but when they worked, oh man, did they work.

The key fact that sticks out in my mind about Doug Hoffman's incredible momentum in NY-23 is that his election would not have been possible had he been the Republican nominee. The fact that we may be about to elect a non-squish from New York has everything to do with the fact that he is running as a third-party independent, and not a Republican (even if the Conservative Party is an auxiliary of the Republicans in most elections).

Hoffman as a Republican would have been too obvious a target and the subject of a relentless barrage of negative TV, websites, mail, and phones branding him as outside the mainstream, anti-choice, anti-worker, etc. But politically, Hoffman has managed to avoid all that until five days out, when it's now clear he's the frontrunner. And as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, Hoffman's success in the polls is built on the back among strong support among independents and (primarily) not Republican regulars disgusted at Scozzafava.

This got me thinking: How many points is an Independent party label worth, assuming you're able to vie for Republican votes in a general election? 5? 10? We know that in races with a plausible third party, that candidate automatically tends to earn more independent and moderate support even if they are ideologically indistinguishable from a Republican (Hoffman) or a Democrat (Chris Daggett in New Jersey).

We also know from Daggett's run in a strong-party, machine state that American politics is entering a phase of third party strength which we last saw in the early '90s with Ross Perot and culminating in the Republican Revolution of '94.

This led me to tweet the following this morning:

Brainstorm: what if Republicans were to withdraw from a series of hot Congressional races and run as conservative independents a la #ny23?

I am not one to believe that a situation exactly like Hoffman's is recreatable across the spectrum. Certainly, we would not want to have to take out every slightly wobbly Republican nominee (Scozzafava's problem was that she was very wobbly) with a third party conservative. With 435 House races on the ballot in 2010, the conservative movement won't have the energy to concentrate its Death Star gamma ray on hapless local establishments in every district.

But what if it were to happen peacefully? Or as a concerted strategy to gain votes?

What if you were to have promising Republican candidates running in Democratic-lean seats say, a few months out from the election, "Let me tell you something. I'm just as sick and tired of the Republicans as I am of the Democrats. So, from this moment forward, I'm running as a common-sense, Independent conservative for Congress."

From one perspective, this would not be helpful to efforts to tie the Republican brand to a broader sense of popular disgust at the Obama/Pelosi overreach. On the other hand, it might be a way for conservatives to invade the center, and thus control the high ground politically.

If you're a party person, don't dismiss this just yet. Say you're the NRCC and you haven't found a good recruit against a vulnerable House Democrat. Say the Republican nominee is a joke, or the incumbent is unopposed. Three months out, you go to your star recruit who turned you down a year ago and ask him to run as an independent. It's a three month campaign as opposed to an 18-month campaign. They don't have to quit their law practice or small business. They enter in the last few miles of the race, and you put serious pressure on the joke nominee to step aside, or put out word through local media and talk radio that this is the guy.

Now, I know one could raise myriad issues here. Ballot access for one. The reflexive aversion to third parties. The relative infrequency of unchallenged vulnerable Democrats, especially because 2010 won't be 2008 or 2006. And the prospect of bloody intra-party battles after the nomination has been settled.

All of these risks are arrayed against a few salient facts. First, the rising disgust at incumbent politicians that will play out over the next couple of years, accompanied by a "pox on both your houses" sentiment. Second, a proven history of entire party blocs picking up and moving to third parties when they need to (NY-23, or Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election). There are two possibilities for an ideological third party candidate -- they can either flop and pose no serious threat (which happens the vast majority of the time because the candidates are nobodies) or dominate (if they are credible).

In a handful of races, perhaps in places where we can't win with the Republican label alone, it might be more useful for the general election to be a strong Independent versus a Democrat rather than a Republican versus a Democrat. At one extreme of the Cook PVI, let's stipulate that the general election against Charlie Rangel was waged with a Puerto Rican small business owner running on the No More Corrupt Politicians Party line with behind the scenes, logistical support from the GOP. At a minimum, that person would stand a better chance than a Republican in that district.

I'm a strong party guy, but I also believe in Sun Tzu's maxim that you do the unexpected to throw your opponent off balance. Strategically unleashing a swarm of conservative independents may be one such strategy for 2010.

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The Left's Tenacious Advocacy for a Public Option

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:42:42 -0700

If the public option passes in some form, thank the liberal blogosphere who put pressure on Democratic members of Congress to publicly threaten to derail health care reform if it wasn't included in the final bill.

The specter of Democrats reverse-filibustering their own President's plan is what has kept the public option alive, even if one could argue that "alive" is akin to a persistent vegetative state.

Contrast this to yes-man approach of the Congressional GOP in the early Bush years, and I personally find a lot to like about the Democratic model of the Congressional party serving as a sort of whip against the political expediency that will be the norm in any White House.

In 2005, I thought it would have been a good idea for conservative Republican members to publicly threaten to oppose any Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. There were multiple problems with this, not the least of which that the Congressional leadership was too spineless to bring a bill out of committee. But another was that conservatives in the House and Senate, with no strategic prodding or muscle in the blogosphere and the activist groups, never made the threat that would have rendered a "compromise" bill dead on arrival.

How groups like Open Left and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are taking on the role of legislative strategy is very smart, and something we can learn from. How the right has fueled the tea party movement to feed into a sense of backlash in the country about the left's total control of government is also very smart, and may have the last laugh in 2010, but will it be enough to deal with the immediate task at hand, derailing a government takeover of health care? I'm not so sure.

Of course, this could all blow up in their faces. Having destroyed any possiblity of compromise, or at least defined "compromise" as something very, very close to an absolutist-left position on health care, the left-blogosphere has ensured that the only alternative to doing nothing at all is a very leftist final bill. And if that's the choice, doing nothing becomes a much, much more palatable option for the Blue Dogs. I'm personally unsure as to how they thread the needle of getting a public option passed with 60 votes.

Still, it's valuable to understand what the left is doing and how it differs from the Congressional GOP "roll over" strategy on White House initiatives in the Bush years, in which we either actively collaborated on bad bills (Medicare Part D) or didn't make a serious push to make the good bills (tax cuts, Social Security) even stronger.

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NY-23: Doug Hoffman for Congress

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:40:13 -0700

The Sienna poll of New York's 23rd Congressional district released Friday found Democrat Bill Owens pulling into the lead with 33 percent, followed by liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava at 29 and Conservative Party hopeful Doug Hoffman at 23.

Combined, the Republican and Conservative lines lead the Democrat 52 to 33 percent. And in a normal election, that would be that -- maybe 95% of the time the Conservatives cross-endorse the Republican.

Scozzafava's particularly egregious liberal record -- pro-card check and pro-stimulus -- rendered that impossible. And so we are faced with a center-right vote that's nearly evenly split, enabling a Democrat (who many believe to be more conservative than Scozzafava) to squeak by.

It is a simple, indisputable fact that the Republican and Conservative voters of NY-23 will have to rally around one candidate to prevent a Democratic pickup. And that candidate should be Conservative Republican Doug Hoffman.

Sadly, the RNC and NRCC are doubling down on a flawed candidate with little chance of generating any significant momentum in the last 16 days. In many ways, this should be a situation like Bernie Sanders' many elections in Vermont, or Joe Lieberman's election in 2006, where there should be no harm and no foul in supporting a viable, like-minded independent over a non-starting major party nominee.

Instead, this looks set to go down as yet another misfire by DC Republicans, drying up the small donor base to the committees with a shortsighted "all Republicans are created equal" approach to supporting liberal Republicans when perfectly acceptable conservative alternatives exist.

I'm not one to suggest that the party should go out of its way to anoint candidates who can't win in blue states. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a pragmatic case for the NRSC and NRCC to stay neutral in more primaries or support conservatives in a way that doesn't lose elections -- and makes it more likely that Mitch McConnell will prevail on the Senate floor more often.

Take everyone's favorite example, the Florida Senate race. There is no doubting the fact -- even amongst conservatives -- that Charlie Crist is practically unbeatable in a general election. Let's peg his chances against Kendrick Meek at 95 percent.

The problem is that Marco Rubio is no slouch in this department either. The polls I've seen have him up double digits over Meek. Assume that Rubio's chances in a general election are between 80 and 85 percent.

Looking at electability only, Crist would still come out ahead. But that doesn't necessarily give Senate Republicans their best outcome. Notice I said Senate Republicans, not conservatives.

Naturally, the national party is going to go for the "W" wherever it can in order to bolster its number of seats. And if this were the only thing that mattered, electability alone would be king.

The problem, as we are finding out in the health care debate, is that it's not enough to have 60 Democrats to break a filibuster, or 41 Republicans to sustain one. How your members vote in that process matters to the outcome. In deciding which candidates to support, the national party committees -- not just activists -- should be looking at whether the candidates are likely to support leadership on key floor votes. If Rubio is just 10 or 15 percent better than Crist on key votes, Crist's electability advantage is nullified from the perspective of Leader McConnell and the Senate Republican Conference.

To me, this could go either way given that Crist is not liberal in the way that Olympia Snowe is, and that his maverickness has always been more about staking out a particular brand in Florida than currying favor with a liberal electorate. But even so, the PR advantage of having a high-profile Hispanic conservative with a potential national career ahead of him tips the scale in Rubio's favor.

The same would go in California. Carly Fiorina does not have a particularly strong electability advantage over Chuck DeVore, and her celebrity CEO past renders her vulnerable to rookie mistakes and greater scrutiny of her private sector activities. It would be one thing for the NRSC to support Fiorina if she were polling 10 to 15 points better than DeVore against Boxer, but she's not.

In deciding whether to support conservatives like Hoffman, Rubio, and DeVore, there is a reasonable middle ground between craven winnerism and a kamikaze strategy that ignores electability. The committees should factor in adherence to core Republican principles (in addition to electability) because the job of a political party is not just to win elections, but to win votes on the floor. And though the impact of an errant member is much less in the House than it is in the Senate, Scozzafava's not-so-veiled threats to switch parties if she isn't treated nicely should render her completely unacceptable to Michael Steele and Pete Sessions, who should make it clear that they won't be blackmailed.

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Rising Rightroots and Declining Netroots Now at Parity (or Better)

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:42:32 -0700

Flickr photo by Mike Bryant

Lost in the hubbub about the tea parties, the health care town hall protests, Joe Wilson, and the ACORN sting is the outcome of a long-simmering meta debate about the vibrancy of the grassroots right and its capacity to organize online. Along with a slew of other bad political indicators, the perception that the GOP might be stuck in a permanent Luddite rut reached its peak with the election of Obama and the role the Internet played in his victory.

Nearly a year later, not only have things turned around, but they've done so faster than anyone could have dreamed or imagined in those post-election doldrums.

First, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, flash mob-like, at Tea Parties not even three months after Obama Nation reached its apogee with the inauguration. The left was caught flat-footed and stammered that it must have been the creation of Fox News, although Fox News existed in the latter Bush years and during the McCain interlude and was unable to conjure up a similar display of enthusiasm in that period.

In August, the rightroots gained further velocity with the health care protests. This was significant in that it was the first head to head match with OFA and the unions, and it was no contest.

The third key moment came when Joe Wilson was able to raise as much (if not more) money than his Democratic opponent after the "You lie!" outburst. The left's immediate rallying around Rob Miller was a textbook netroots play, aided by ready-made infrastructure (an ActBlue page ready to accept contributions without crashing and display real-time feedback). For a Republican -- especially one deemed to be on the "wrong" side of a PR war -- to have been competitive in money raised with a netroots Democrat is something that simply would not have happened in the Bush years. This is especially striking given that Markos, Stoller, Bowers et al. made money raised for candidates the sine qua non of the netroots, an outgrowth of the left's 1970s era obsession with countering "big money" in politics.

Finally, the O'Keefe/Giles video bust of ACORN -- the right's biggest media coup since Rathergate -- showed the right to be getting its sea legs in investigative journalism, a space virtually patented by the left in recent years.

What we seem to be witnessing is the Feiler Faster Thesis in action, with a robust grassroots opposition to Obama, aided by the Internet, taking shape far more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and comparatively speaking, in a far more timely fashion than it took the left to gets its act together against Bush.

(The big asterisk in that comparison with the Bush years is 9/11 and the wars, but looking back to August and early September 2001, the Democratic opposition to Bush was weak and defined largely by spineless Washington pols like Tom Daschle rather than a sea of grassroots protest, which became apparent only later when the Internet became a viable organizing vehicle.)

So, the fear that Republicans would be disorganized for months if not years after Obama taking office has proven to be unfounded. The right's rise online (and offline too) has been a pretty automatic reaction to Democratic hegemony in Washington, disproving the notion that there is anything intrinsic to the right or the left driving the use of specific tools. And wrapping this up in a neat little bow, the political environment turns out to be the decisive factor in how emphatically people use the technology, not the other way around.

Understandably, not all of this has been online. Talk radio, and yes, cable news, still plays a role, particularly in the critical task of driving calls to member offices. As I noted on Twitter in August,

For all the talk about lefty activism recently, it seems the right has an institutional advantage in contacting Congress... on every issue

From immigration to health care, most of the time you hear about a lopsided disparity with one side shutting down phone lines on Capitol Hill, it's conservatives doing it. While the political climate may dictate how effectively the tools get used, the right and left still have a tendency to focus on different things, with the right jumpstarting its movement in recent months with legislative advocacy and moving bodies to events, and while the left first built the netroots around raising money for candidates.

As a skeptic of the hegemony of money in campaigns and a believer in shoeleather organizing, it's not surprising to me that a newly resurgent right has made such an explosive impact on the national debate in the last two months. All the folks who wondered for five years where our response to the netroots was now have their answer.

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Can We Have Buckley Back?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:32:39 -0700

Over the last few days, Jon Henke has laid out the case for the Right more strongly disavowing outfits like WorldNetDaily that actively peddle Birther nonsense. To the extent the mainstream Right has weighed in, it has been to urge Jon to ignore WND and move on, in the interests avoiding an intra-movement civil war. Some have even tried to subtly distance Jon from the conservative movement, saying his views don't represent those of most conservatives. Many on the Right have made the calculation that however distasteful their views, a public fight with the Birthers just isn't worth it.

As a fiscal and social conservative, I happen to think Jon is completely in the right here, both substantively and strategically. Don't raise the canard that we ought to be attacking Democrats first. Conservatives are entirely within their rights to have public debates over who will publicly represent them, and who will be allowed to affiliate with the conservative movement.

The Birthers are the latest in a long line of paranoid conspiracy believers of the left and right who happen to attach themselves to notions that simply are not true. Descended from the 9/11 Truthers, the LaRouchies, the North American Union buffs, and way back when, the John Birch Society, the Birthers are hardly a new breed in American politics.

Each and every time they have appeared, mainstream conservatives from William F. Buckley to Ronald Reagan have risen to reject these influences -- and I expect that will be the case once again here.

But there is another subtext that makes Jon's appeal more urgent. As a pretty down-the-line conservative, I don't believe I am alone in noting with disappointment the trivialization, excessive sloganeering, and pettiness that has overtaken the movement of late. In "The Joe the Plumberization of the GOP," I argued that conservatives have grown too comfortable with wearing scorn as a badge of honor, content to play sarcastic second fiddle to the dominant culture of academia and Hollywood with second-rate knock-off institutions. A side effect of this has been a tendency to accept conspiracy nuts as a slightly cranky edge case within the broad continuum of conservatism, rather than as a threat to the movement itself.

Those advocating a tough stand against the Birthers like to point to William F. Buckley and the Birchers.

In founding National Review, Buckley made a point of casting out the conspiracy nuts and the cranks of his day because he saw them as a fundamental threat to a conservatism that was just emerging as a political force. In doing so, he was able to define conservatism for a generation.

What is interesting about Buckley (and that is so different today) was his ability to align intellectual firepower and a faster march to the Right. Buckley was a man of class and erudition who happened to be more conservative than virtually all of his peers. That's the key point. To the extent we think of intellectuals today, we deride them as creatures of the Left. When they are active within conservative circles, they are discarded as to the left of the movement. The archetypical center-right intellectual today is a guy like Ross Douthat, whose ideas (to be fair) are often outside the conservative mainstream. Most of the party's rising intellectuals are seen as advocating a shift away from social conservative issues, which are still deeply relevant to a critical mass of Americans beyond the two coasts. Back in Buckley's day, it was possible to get 175-proof conservatism in Ivy League flavoring.

Perhaps the intellectual composition of the conservative (or liberal) movement wasn't all that different in Buckley's time, but Buckley provided an ideal -- and set a standard -- for conservatives to position themselves as scholarly thought leaders within the broader culture that simply no longer exists today -- despite numerous conservative academics toiling facelessly in the vineyards. This gave a Buckley the credibility to cast out the movement's lesser lights, and impose a layer of discernment between fact and fiction inside the movement. In politics, symbols matter. Just like there could only be one Reagan, there could only be one Buckley.

The automatic problem that arises when someone who is not a William F. Buckley (and none of us here pretend to be) is that you're instantly tagged a RINO for calling out something that is objectively and demonstrably false. The space between fact and fiction is confused as a litmus test between right and left. But what if the WNDers are not the true conservatives in this argument? What if the actual test of conservatism was not how fervently you oppose Obama, or where you went to school, or where you pray, but how firmly your conservatism is rooted in First Principles and not personalities or conspiracy?

Within my relatively short lifetime, I still remember a time when success and intellectual achievement were more often than not conservative virtues, and I remember WFB looming large in this framework. Recent Democratic gains within the creative and educated classes have eroded this image, creating a media dynamic where intelligence is seen as aligning with the left within the Democratic Party, and the center within the Republican Party.

That is an untenable position for a conservative movement that needs to generate new ideas and groom future leaders who can speak articulately and persuasively to the whole country. (It's true that Ronald Reagan was not a book learner, but under the theory of multiple intelligences, he more than held his own.) Before conservatism was a viable political movement, it was a viable intellectual movement, and it was those on the center and in the left who were seen as intellectually slovenly.

This is why there is a unique urgency now to cast out the obscurantists and the conspiracy nuts. We don't have a Buckley anymore. Our intellectual giants have died off and not being replaced. And preventing the lowest common denominator from filling the void is a constant daily struggle.

In a movement and a party that has largely defined itself outside centers of higher learning in recent years (for good or ill) I believe the time is ripe for a return to Buckleyite elite conservatism.

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From the Valley to the Hill, We’re Ready to Engage

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:54:18 -0700

Today, we welcome to the team David Kralik, who will be leading Engage’s new California office. Based in San Francisco, David comes to us from American Solutions for Winning the Future, where he was Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Director of Internet Strategy. -ed.

It’s great to be joining a very deep bench of talent. I moved out to California almost two years ago at the request of former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. It’s been a great opportunity to embed myself with the tech sector and really understand their culture.

When I first moved out here, I thought it was cliché to say “So Goes California, So Goes the Nation.” But it really is true. Next year’s Governor’s race in California will be a bellwether in watching how sound fiscal policy will fare against reckless, unaccountable special interest insider spending. In addition, our state’s penchant for voting on ballot initiatives has driven the national debate on immigration, labor law and of course, marriage. That will continue and bringing together top technical leadership on both coasts with these pressing issues will be critical in the years ahead.

If you are still defining your digital strategy with words like “Web 2.0” then it’s time to Engage and see the future. Over the last 18 months, I’ve traveled over 22,000 miles up and down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley meetings with hundreds of technology executives. I’ve learned from some of leading experts when it comes to the future of social networking, mobile and viral media and am here to offer those insights to clients.

As I’ve traveled around the Valley, one thing that is pretty clear to me is that Silicon Valley and Washington, DC are in two completely different cultural paradigms. Washington, DC has a tough time navigating Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley doesn’t really understand Washington, DC. The Washington Post described me as “A Bridge From The Valley to the Hill.” I’ve worked for some very large employers in Washington, DC that represent some very large companies and , in true Silicon Valley fashion, I am involved in my own tech startup. So, that’s exactly what I intend to bring to Engage: Making you succeed by bringing technology best practices from the world capital of innovation and giving startups a voice in Washington, DC.

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The Public Albatross

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:59:58 -0700

Whatever the outcome of the health care saga, it seems safe to conclude that the public option is dead. It is worth analyzing its impending demise for what it teaches us about American attitudes towards government, and how political battles are won.

The key fact here is that the public option is not some long-standing, highly pedigreed idea engrained in the liberal psyche, in the way that school choice or private Social Security accounts have been for the intellectual right. In fact, the idea of a public option is very new. It was first raised in 2007 by Berkeley economist Jacob Hacker, and popularized as a device that would "someday magically turn into single payer."

Continues Mark Schmitt at TAPPED:

Following Edwards' lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker's policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now's political strategy. It was a real high-wire act -- to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

The public option is an idea that was born, literally, in the last Presidential campaign. Even so, it was little discussed in 2008, when the main bone of contention was Hillary's individual mandate to purchase health insurance. A Google News search from the height of the Hillary-Obama primary battle shows two health care-related mentions of the "public option" in January 2008, zero in February, and two in March, one in April, and two in May and June.

That the public option was new and unfamiliar made it easily characterized as a ploy to introduce single-payer in miniature, which it was self-transparently was in the eyes of its originators.

Indeed, reading through the founding documents of the public option is about as damning as if one got ahold of a secret dossier of Milton Friedman's proclaiming school vouchers a necessary "compromise" that would eventually usher in the death of public education in America.

So, the public option was not serioiusly discussed in 2008. It was never seen as central to Democratic demands for health care until mid-2009. Since the failure of Hillarycare, Democrats have continually stressed that they would get to universal coverage by regulating and by building on the existing system. Indeed, for all that Hillarycare was being pilloried as socialized medicine, not even it contained as overt a nod to single-payer as a government-run health care "option."

Exactly like the Social Security fight in 2005, liberals hoped that by injecting more government into the health care system they could change the political culture, just as conservatives hoped private accounts would awaken more of us to the rich abundance of the free market.

However, as the economic crisis showed, the political system is only designed to tolerate sudden changes to America's economic model in a crisis atmosphere. We've seen more than a good bit of economic nationalization in recent years/months, but only as a response to a perceived crisis. Could health care in America be nationalized? Sure -- if the pandemic flu struck the United States and was well on its way to killing millions of Americans and private institutions were judged inadequate -- and even then, political leaders would caution that it was a temporary measure. Welcome to the "bailout" school of health care reform.

The problem for Obama is that after months of "crisis" after "crisis", the welcome mat has worn thin. Not unexpectedly, "emergency" moves toward socialism in the auto and financial sectors have sidelined elective moves towards the same in health care.

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Energy at the Edges Moves the Center

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:37:31 -0700

I really like and respect Marc Ambinder, but he is just wildly off base here:

But Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. They ramped up much too quickly. When smaller, conservative groups Astroturfed, they inevitably brought to the meetings the type of Republican activist who was itching for a fight and who would use the format to vent frustrations at President Obama himself. There were plenty of activists who really wanted to know about health care, and some who were probably misinformed -- scared out of their chairs -- to some degree, but the loudest voices tended to be the craziest, the most extreme, the least sensible, and the most easy to mock.

The American people remain anxious and confused about health care reform. That is an underlying reality that Republican activists are so eager to exploit. But doing so required a certain restraint -- and a willingness to traffic in at least approximate truths -- and an ability to make distinctions within their own ranks about which tactics were valid and which tactics were venomous. It also required a sophistication about the media. ...

Remember, the target audience for Republicans is Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. They won't panic unless they perceive organic anxiety. The White House's goal was to prevent the Blue Dogs from panicking. The swing constituents in these congressional districts aren't angry Republicans, and the Blue Dogs know this. They're political independents for whom the sanctity of the process is important. These are the type of voters who like President Obama because he appears willing to bring people together even though they don't agree with their policies.

As usual, in a pattern that the left patented during the Bush administration, the organized right lost control of its message. ...

That last sentence is really the nub of the problem with this post, since the organized left kind of had the last laugh at Bush's expense in 2008.

I know what it's like to work in a political operation controlled by the White House. And I can attest to the fact that the Obama people are following the Bush playbook to a T: first, pivot to the scraggly disorganization and off-messageness of the opposition.

This is what "Rush is the leader of the Republican Party" was all about. It was what the strange recycling the birther stuff months after it first surfaced was all about. And it's embodied in the ethos of Marc's post, in which any failure to act within the received boundaries of political discourse is automatically a liability for Republicans and a plus for the Obama White House.

For the Bush Administration in mocking the anti-war movement, and Obama deligitimizing the "mob," what both White Houses missed is that the general public has different sets of expectations for political leaders and opposition movements. Oppositions are supposed to be loud, vocal, off-message, inchoate. The President of the United States is supposed to have his stuff together.

Take as an object lesson the Bush Administration's treatment of the anti-war movement. Early on, they were, in words Marc used, "easy to mock." The conservative media had a field day roasting Susan Sontag, then Michael Moore, then Cindy Sheehan, then John "stuck in Iraq" Kerry. And, at times, this genuinely rallied the base.

However, the left ultimately won the political argument about the war (even if they lost the policy argument) -- despite the ineptitude of their leading voices -- because the ever-increasing chorus of opposition eventually ignited a media backlash against the war. When Bush was at 70%+, his prosecution of the war was first branded "divisive" because something like 500,000 anti-war activists were marching on CNN. And it was a short hop from branding the war "divisive" to branding it a disaster.

Much the same is now happening with health care. The public option is, at the very minimum, now perceived as divisive. As controversial. As anything but the sweetness and light upon which Obama uniquely depended on to govern.

In the long run, the side that most insistently believes in its own arguments usually wins. This neatly sums up the outcome of the 2008 election, and the current state of the health care debate. I don't think every swing voter would categorically embrace everything that's happened at the town hall meetings (on either side), but the fervor of one side over the other sends important signals to unaffiliated voters that the doubts outweigh the reassurances on Obamacare, and to armchair quarterbacks everywhere, that the President is on the defensive and dogged by opposition.

More than that, it sends signals to swing Congressmen. It's not uncommon for members of Congress to freak out when one, maybe two people, pose uncomfortable questions in town hall meetings. Because members tend to self-perceive a bubble around them, they place high value on anecdotal feedback.

Now, scale this up to the scenes from town hall meetings. What are people who are programmed to overreact to negative feedback from a handful of questioners supposed to do when confronted with hundreds? React the opposite way? Implausible. Even if they believe the bogus astroturf argument, is it not reasonable to believe a seedling of doubt has been sown even in the most partisan Democratic members, that Obamacare is a political dog that's stirred up a hornet's nest.

More likely than not when September rolls around, the Blue Dogs are going to have a clear message for the White House: "Make this go away."

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Prepare for a Blowout

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:31:22 -0700

I am a strong proponent of the idea that candidate recruitment is the ultimate futures market of elections. Collectively, the decisions made by candidates on both sides tell a lot about where politicos on the ground see the political environment headed in the next year to 18 months. It was not surprising that in 2006 and especially in 2008, candidate recruitment on our side sucked wind. Only one Senate race -- Louisiana -- was even remotely considered a Republican pickup opportunity in '08.

For 2010, the story is different. We are by and large getting our top-tier recruits in Senate races, and in more and more House races. And the White House is not getting theirs. The bumper crop of good candidates we had in the 2002 and 2004 cycles appears to have returned.

Though it's early -- I don't think people thought 1994 could be a really big year until at least February of that year -- I do think we have to prepare for the idea that 2010 could be a big, big year that could put us back within striking distance in both the Senate and the House. Normally, I wouldn't want to raise expectations -- but going back to that candidate recruitment futures thing: if you are remotely thinking of running for office in the next few years, 2010 could be your best shot, and here's why:

The horrendous 2006 and 2008 cycles have depressed Republican totals in Congress to far below the historical mean. Though the fact that there were two successive 20+ seat losses in the House and 5+ seat losses in the Senate in the House is historically unique, collectively they equal one 1980 or 1994-style wipeout -- after which Democrats finally began to recover.
The unique confluence of youth and African American turnout for Obama padded vote totals for Congressional Democrats by about 4 points -- and in a midterm -- I'm sorry -- those votes won't be there. We saw this pretty clearly in the Georgia Senate runoff. In 2012, however, those voters might be back -- making 2010 an opportune moment for a promising Congressional challenger to gain a foothold.
The Democrats are now clearly responsible for everything, and trying to blame Bush and the GOP wears thinner and thinner by the day. Even if the economy recovers somewhat, and with massive job losses still on the horizon, I don't see people feeling that recovery, let's remember that the economy was in a clear recovery by 1994 but that didn't help Clinton and Democrats.

On a micro-tactical level, Obama may be taking great pains to avoid Clinton's fate on health care, as Ezra Klein details in Sunday's Washington Post, but the broader optics are starting to converge for Obama and Clinton: young, energetic change agents who are being proven ineffective, overexposed, and prone to ADD (Clinton held 38 press conferences his first year, drawing this comparison to Obama's first few days in office).

In many ways, the proving ground for this hypothesis won't be Congress, but the states. There we have 50 distinct political cultures than run in parallel to Washington. And, as Michael Barone notes, the mood there seems to point in the direction of belt-tightening and more humble government, not grandiose new infrastructure or health care schemes.

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Don't Bet on Crist Over Rubio

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:37:31 -0700

At about this time every three months, we have to endure the typical quarterly fundraising roundups. This one from The Hill shows the problem with the genre, headlined "FEC reports show Crist the man to beat in Florida." This in response to Crist raising an eye-popping $4.3 million in the 2nd quarter, against Marco Rubio's $340,000.

Crist may be a slight favorite in the Republican primary, but money will have nothing to do with why.

I bang this drum pretty often, but ask presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney how far early, high dollar bundler support got them. Or Virginia Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe on how much a 10-to-1 cash advantage is worth.

Underfunded candidates like Rubio don't need more money now. The need an argument. A bulletproof argument from a plausible candidate is worth tens of millions of dollars in any primary, overwhelming a financial advantage of any magnitude. While frontrunners confuse high-dollar fundraising for actual grassroots support, a conclusion that headlines like The Hill's do nothing to discourage, smart underdogs would do right to focus on building an impregnable message advantage. Because that's the part that counts for 90% in any electoral victory.

John McCain's campaign was defunct and broke at this point in the race, without money to pay a pollster. Mike Huckabee had no money. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani spent $60 million plus to win a single delegate, attending fundraisers when he should have been in New Hampshire. A leading Republican strategist recently told me that he wonders whether money doesn't wind up making our campaigns worse while the lack of money makes them better and more focused. Look at McCain with no money, vs. McCain with money (pre-implosion and general election).

Crist's fundraising aside, he's still a relatively popular governor with 100% name ID, and so still the "man to beat." But fundraising trophies don't make it so. Complacency is his biggest enemy.

Crist's campaign is the antithesis of Rebuildness. Of Crist's $4.3 million how much was online? How much came from donations of $100 or less? How many people have signed up on his e-mail list since he announced? How many of his supporters would crawl on glass to see him win?

In running a campaign, that latter kind of support is the kind I want, and I think Rubio has it.

And not only that, but he's a particularly strong and plausible kind of grassroots candidate. He's no Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. Had Crist not stepped in, he'd be considered a top recruit and a rising star. Rubio would easily beat Kendrick Meek in a general election.

We have two uniquely talented people running for Senate in a seat we will probably hold in Florida. Instead of elbowing one aside, we should be grabbing the popcorn and watching this one go the distance.

The primary will be close. Among voters who know both, Crist and Rubio are tied. Crist's money will not buy him more name ID or goodwill; only his bully pulpit as Governor can do that, and he's surrendering it. Meanwhile, Rubio's talents as a candidate, his crossover potential, and his appeal to grassroots conservatives mean he has nowhere to go but up. I still think Crist narrowly wins absent a massive screwup, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Recent elections have not been kind to moneyed "frontrunners."

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The End of the Press Release

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:36:28 -0700

Our friend Jonathan Rick notes an interesting trend: more big companies are eschewing the traditional press release, and are announcing news in first-person media like blogs and Twitter:

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf-not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

As Jon hints at, this is more than just a format change, but part of a revolt against contrived speech.

What social media gives powerful people from politicians to CEOs is an opportunity to communicate big ideas on their own terms, in media they personally create. Being on Twitter has created a paradigm shift for many a celebrity and political figure — either for good or occasional chagrin. You mean I can say what I actually think, in my own words, right now? It’s amazing how bad P.R. has made this basic principle of everyday human interaction seem somehow alien and unexpected.

With a built-in audience of bloggers and social media influentials who will carry your message (big caveat: if it’s interesting), it’s no longer necessary to go for the hard sell, or for that perfectly crafted quote that will show up in the paper. Bloggers are all about authentic voice; what they say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

Getting in the papers is a nice bonus, but secondary to building a direct constituency for your product or candidate online. If your story is naturally interesting, or even better, can be vouched for in real time by thousands of people congregating online, the media will have no choice but to report on it. When reading up on the latest tech or political trend, mainstream media is usually the last place I hear about something, the final validator of whether something is important or not — usually after it’s been dissected to death in the blogosphere.

This doesn’t mean it’s not important to get your story out to the press, but even the press is no longer reading canned press releases. Increasingly, blogs are the assignment desks for mainstream media — the place where reporters go to get the pulse of the digerati. Indeed, many mainstream reporters, like ABC’s Jake Tapper, break news through their own blogs.

For my part, I can’t promise I’ll never use a wire service. But the stuff I’d put out on it would probably look a lot like the following: “Candidate X just posted the following to his blog: LINK.”

Social Media & Politics

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:54:54 -0700

Last week I had the pleasure of joining a panel on social media and politics at the Milken Global Conference. The Conference targets CEOs and featured Nobel-prize winning economists, major nation defense ministers, Olympic athletes, and this year, Rush Limbaugh. So what was I doing there?

Social media’s role in politics fascinates even the triple-Ivy-league credentialed academic. How is the social web effecting who we elect and how we elect them? Will the social web have long-term effects on the shape of our democracy? Will the candidate who best understands social media prevail?

Our panel responded to these questions and more with a summary of our discussion below:

Candidates Must No Longer Run and Hide.

Voters expect candidates to make a presence and engage voters where they are: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and dozens of smaller social networks. These virtual meeting places are today’s version of town fairs, civic club meetings and after school programs, except online they take place around-the-clock. This means candidates can make their presence felt on their own time; conversely, once they begin to engage with supporters, they set a standard for the level of activity expected of them.

Authenticity Rules the Day.

Some candidates have “the gift:” this is the smooth-talking, heart-string pulling appeal of Presidents old and new, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama respectively. Such candidates have a unique ability to win over voters with their authenticity, although one could make a strong argument that their perceived authenticity is as big an act as your average politician. No matter, candidates with “the gift,” have a natural ability to rule social media too. They have an appeal; they inspire you to connect with them; they win you over with their hopeful message. Ronald Reagan, had he been running today, would thrive in the social media.

So what is a candidate to do who has less of “the gift?” They could be themselves for one; and treat their supporters as friends, valued members of their team, and the key to their electoral success. After all, roughly 20% of Internet users, according to Pew, received and/or shared information through a social network in the 2008 elections. Social network participants are real people, and the network is purely an easier, more efficient and personal way of communicating with them than traditional media. It’s not a new phenomenon for the more likeable candidate to win an election; social media platforms allow candidates to feature their likeability, if they choose to open up and let the walls down.

More Networked, Less Dependent on Money(wo)men.

The social web is the ultimate flattener of influence. Through most social networks, every individual has the same opportunity for influencing the greater community, and thus one would assume, the candidates they support. One is ranked by how interesting and involved they are, and not by the amount of money they have to contribute. Popularity matters instead, as the number of friends one has determines their value as an advocate for the candidates and issues they support.

Most social networks are purely democratic institutions; their members, particularly America’s youth, are being socialized to expect an equal stake in historically heirarchical institutions like our government. Populism sells on social networks, a lesson for tomorrow’s candidates. The questions is whether the influence of online networks — where membership is free — will surpass the influence of money in politics, and if so, when?

Social Score Does Not Equal Voter Score.

Or does it? Barack Obama currently has over 6,000,000 Facebook supporters while John McCain has less than 600,000. If an election were held today, would Obama receive ten times more votes than McCain? Of course not. So how good of an indicator of voter support is Facebook, or any social network? The most socially networked candidate is not necessarily the most popular at the ballot box. Ron Paul had many more Facebook supporters than most of his primary challengers; yet, they received more votes than he did.

But, we shouldn’t ignore social network support just yet. Candidates who understand the value of running an authetic campaign, and the importance of communicating with and engaging every interested person online, most likely exhibits those characteristics offline as well. The campaign who treats a Facebook organizer the same as the way they treat a $300 donor is likely to earn favor from more voters than the one who has a static politican profile. And yes, the campaign that makes an effort to engage voters through Facebook, when their opponent is absent, is more likely to win. Social networks matter.

What’s Next?

I don’t know what is the next MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning or Twitter, but if history repeats itself, we will all be socially networked on new, improved platforms by the time we cast our vote for President in 2012. Remember Friendster?

What We Learned from #NY20

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:12:43 -0700

On Friday, the special election contest in New York’s 20th Congressional District drew to a close, with Democrat Scott Murphy edging out Republican Jim Tedisco by slightly over 400 votes out of nearly 160,000 cast. Tedisco finance chairman Tom Lewis has posted his postmortem on the race from the inside looking out.

Though the result is different than we as Republicans may have hoped for, the NY-20 special election generated new levels of online activism on the Right that show that the conservative base is re-engaging in poltitics online in the Obama era.

Engage was brought in to maximize the campaign’s online fundraising in the final three weeks of the campaign. Here’s a snapshot, by the numbers, of what the grassroots were able to accomplish in NY-20:

$121,964 raised online from March 11th, when we started to Election Day, March 31st.
$47,615 raised online for the recount.
Over $214,000 raised online for the campaign and recount, out of a total of $1.39 million raised from outside donors.
Over 3,100 online donors giving an average of $68.
Two thirds of the campaign’s donors gave online.

The groundwork for the campaign’s fundraising success was laid early, as new media maven Ali Akbar hustled to get a simple message out on Twitter and the blogosphere: $20 for NY-20. This message was amplified by Newt Gingrich, who exhorted conservatives to donate to Tedisco during his speech to CPAC, spurring a flood of new contributors. Our activists were already motivated by a simple, clear narrative: take back a seat the Democrats had captured in 2006 in a swing district Obama had won by 3 points.

When we got started, we created an iContribute fundraising widget that displayed the total amount raised as part of our fundraising drive in real time, along with the names and hometowns of the last 5 donors who agreed to go public. We also believed setting an ambitious yet achievable goal was crucial for success. We started with: 20K for NY-20, starting precisely 20 days from Election Day. Here’s what the widget looked like shortly after the first goal was met:

It took just six days for the grassroots to shatter this goal. We wound up upping the goal three more times during the election.

Along the way — and after crunching some numbers — we learned some valuable lessons. They include:

Transparency Works. Activists want to see the difference their efforts are making in real time. Something interesting happens when you go public with a goal — and show people the real numbers. Your fundraising appeal turns into more than an annoying ask and becomes a piece of interesting original content that people congregate around and can help shape. Though many would still have donated because of the overall excitement surrounding this race, we saw the numbers spike as we got closer to reaching a goal.The following chart shows the overall progression of total money raised in the three weeks before Election Day. You’ll see spikes leading up to the $20K, $40K, $80K, and $120K milestones.

And since the widget was a relative novelty early on, here’s a chart that shows just the numbers when it was first tried, leading up to the $20,000 goal.

Transparency is Popular. When given the chance, 77% of donors opted to show their names on the widget. Bigger donors were just as likely as smaller donors to opt for instant transparency.

The Twitter Effect. There have been many discussions of Twitter’s impact on this race and on online activism more broadly. Some have even credited this effort with raising over $120,000 “through Twitter.” We have some interesting data to share that might shed light on these assumptions.

First, it’s unclear how much money was raised through Twitter specifically, but it was more than pocket change — and well south of a majority. Some number crunching after the election revealed that about 14% of online donors were Twitter users. This is in line with the rate of Twitter usage we’ve seen in other online activist communities. Assuming these Twitter users donated the average, at least $20,000 was donated online by Twitter users.

iContribute gives campaigns the power to create fundraising tracking pages on the fly. I created a personal page for my Twitter followers and used the link whenever I tweeted about the campaign. According to Google Analytics, my page got 757 unique pageviews and produced $1,280 in online contributions from 15 donors, or nearly $2 per unique click.

Another interesting example came on Election Night. Knowing the election would go to a recount, a group of us tweeted a link asking people to donate to the post-Election Day effort. 518 people clicked on that link, resulting in 11 donations, eight of them on Election Night.

For those evaluating the effectiveness of Twitter as a fundraising tool, I would say two things. First, don’t forget that e-mail — and walk-in web donations from people who are organically interested in your effort — will still be your biggest sources of online income. At best, Twitter will be a small but singificant share of the online fundraising puzzle, just like blog-driven fundraising drives that can raise 6 or 7 figures in 7 or 8 figure-online efforts. But don’t also forget Twitter’s essential role in distributing your message among key influentials who talk to others. The nation’s top bloggers, radio hosts, and TV personalities are on Twitter. If you can get an instantly peer-reviewed message to them in their most compelling and least crowded information channel, they will take it and repeat it to others, further enhancing the “surround sound” around your campaign or movement.

E-mail Still Matters. As an example of the point above, never, ever, ever neglect an opportunity to build up your list organically. By the end, the Tedisco campaign had built up a pretty solid list of donors and activists. An e-mail the morning after the election quickly raised $7,901 from 188 people to support the post-election effort.

Nor was the Tedisco campaign the only group to send e-mails in support of their candidate. An e-mail by Fred Thompson to his Presidential list yielded at least $30,000 in donations, as I wrote about earlier. This is an opportunity that most people with big lists and future aspirations miss. Instead of raising money for the nebulous thing that is your PAC, and then dispensing it $5,000 at a time, why not raise it directly for the candidates who need it most? Not only will your activists find the message more relevant, but added goodwill will be generated by sending a worthy candidate heaping gobs of cash above and beyond the $5K limit.

Online Fundraising is only growing bigger — not having a coherent online strategy is now like not having a direct mail strategy, or a high-dollar strategy. Campaigns have always been concerned about raising money, and for Republican campaigns in 2008, this meant wrangling the most Bush Rangers & Pioneers and sending the most spammy direct mail pieces, all while Obama built the biggest fundraising machine known to man one e-mail and one $25 donor at a time.

This won’t change with one campaign and likely won’t decisively change until 2012, but the fact that the majority of donors engaged online — in a campaign with many traditional elements to it — is significant.

It’s easy to forget that fundraising in Congressional races is still dominated by PACs, contributions from other elected officials, and personal relationships. Of the $1.39 million the campaign raised from outside sources, $845,000 came from individuals. Over a quarter of that came in online — and for a fraction of the cost of traditional fundraising.

One of the most astonishing — but also frustrating — aspects of online fundraising is that the money almost invariably comes in late, when activists are at the height of their enthusiasm about a race. Of the $550,000+ raised after March 11th, when the campaign filed their pre-election FEC report, about a third came in online. Of money that came in from individuals after March 11th, nearly half was online. When it mattered the most, the grassroots was there, expanding the campaign’s footprint right in the days before the election.

We won’t say that everything about this election turned out exactly as we’d hoped. But for the right, NY-20 was an awakening of sorts in the lost art of grassroots online action. We were proud to be there for a small part of it.

A Call for Great Designers

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:23:15 -0700

Engage is putting out a call for great freelance designers to join our growing network.

Great design can be an elusive thing, but it’s something we value deeply here at Engage. Studies have shown that users judge websites by their design in the blink of an eye. Unless they’re extremely prodigious speed-readers, most users will judge design long before they will the content of a website.

But great design is more than just that initial “wow” factor. It should persist throughout the entirety of the user experience. Good, clean design can make navigating through a site dramatically easier, getting people where they need to go. When a great design is aligned with a client’s essential brand and animating purpose, it sends the public at large an important about the professionalism and seriousness of the organization, and can drive your message. In an age of free tools and template websites, standing out from the pack becomes all the more important.

We’re looking for serious, award-winning designers who can deliver original, pixel-perfect website, logo/brand, and user experience design that breaks the mold. Submit your resumes and portfolios to jobs@engagedc.com — and if you care about great candidates and organizations getting great design, we hope you’ll retweet this post. Since this isn’t a single job listing, feel free to contact us if you’re stronger in just one or two key areas.

Here’s a bit of what we’re looking for:

Someone who focuses above all else on web and interactive design
A firm understanding of the principles of user experience design and designing for applications
Experience with logo and brand design a plus
Ability to code clean CSS/XHTML or ability to integrate this into your process a plus
Experience with designing for politics and public policy. Since we want sites that break the mold, we won’t sweat this point — but for the political newbies in the bunch, we’ll be looking for a well thought out critique of the state of the political web today.
Do you personally do both design and development? Then this probably isn’t for you. We want people who are excellent at one or the other, and it’s difficult to be great at both.
Been in CSS Remix, WebCreme, or been otherwise honored for your design? Then we definitely want to hear from you.
Lastly, as conservative and Republican web strategists, a clear motivation to serve like-minded organizations will be considered a definite plus.

SXSW: Startup Management

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:48:13 -0700

11:45 - In the Dogster panel on startup management on the Hilton. Talks about how to do layoffs. First, look objectively at the money situation. Then look at which departments need to be cut. When you get down to individuals, it’s hard. They were open about communicating, doing a preso on why they did it, the overall economic situation, given to all employees.
11:47 - Economic times have made things more focused and intense. Attitude of “Okay, let’s f-ing do this.” Taking on the economy and beating it. I like this.
11:47 - I can’t believe people in tech are so left. This is total capitalism!
11:57 - Once again I have been sucked into e-mail. Complete ADD.
12:00 - The upteenth question about how to balance the initial startup mode where everyone does everything with a more hierarchical mode. Sales vs. tech guys.
12:16 - When to take VC money. Only when I have an opportunity I can’t execute on without it.

SXSW: Presenting Straight to the Brain

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:42:49 -0700

10:41 - I’m here for the end of this. Great breakfast at Cisco’s and the Louis Gray panel at the Hilton was oversubscribed. They’re talking about effective PowerPoint, and if rapid fire visuals are the right away to go.
10:42 - The listing / bulletpoint approach does not hold a candle to the storytelling approach in presentations.
10:51 - They did a yoga exercise– touch your toes. Okay….
10:51 - “Don’t make a better presentation on X… make a user better on X…”
10:52 - Lawyer presenter: I have failed when audience goes into “Blackberry prayer mode.” If you are engaging with social networks instead of the panel you aren’t learning. Other panelist says notetaking OK (like I am now). General question is if backchannels are okay.
10:54 - Kathy Sierra likes backchannels. Live-tweeting ok. If people want to have a conversation about a panel, fine.
10:56 - PowerPoint is a bad word processor. Tap into popular culture. Plays a Star Wars themed slide.
10:56 - Slide: “Also, puppies.” Does every slide have a pulse? -Sierra. Displays cute puppy slide.
10:57 - Tip: Figure out your three most important points and build everything around it.
10:59 - Questioner: How do you deal with rigid cultures, like NIH, in which all presentations have to have heavy science? A: Have to educate internally that what you’re doing has no basis in research.

SXSW: Marketing Meets New Media

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:36:12 -0700

3:34pm - In the Marketing Meets New Media Panel with Jonathan Coulton and also Kos.
3:35 - Challenge for bloggers is breaking out; tools for getting your word out are now free and this leads to noisiness.
3:37 - Kirsner mispronounces Kos’s name “kahs”
3:39 - They’re playing a Coulton music video set to WoW. Now I know why he’s a cult hit.
3:40 - These 5 people have been in the vanguard of trying to figure out how to build an audience and fanbase online.
3:45 - Coulton: Tools borne out of laziness then I got lucky.
3:48 - Natasha Westcoat: committed to using any popular tools like YouTube. Get involved in every website possible because the traffic is there.
3:49 - Kos states the obvious — the product is very good for both Westcoat and Coulton. Kos: I’m not a very good writer. I started in 2002 — first mover advantage? There was still quite a crowd. Two things really stood out. I had a very narrow niche that no one else was hitting. For me, it was horserace coverage. (Now we have Nate Silver.) At the time I was talking about polls. I was also a veteran — could speak about the logistical issue of the Iraq war buildup; media didn’t know what they were talking about. The second was branding. Daily Kos is now as know as “big orange” “the great orange Satan.” I didn’t use the same Blogspot template; same blue background. Very conscious decision to use a color no one else was using; orange, and the icon — revolutionary patriot with the flag which has become iconic. Very conscious of people remembering the branding of the site. (Smart.)
3:51 - Kirsner — was there a key link that built your traffic? Kos: No. In 2000, there was a site called Olivetti. Then Delphi Forums. Then Political Wire. Comment threads at PW shut down b/c of political warfare. Then over to MyDD. Shut down comments on MyDD. So they went to Daily Kos. He learned from previous comment fails. Then there were so-called liberal “pundits” like Joe Klein were pro-Iraq. The Internet at the time was dominated by the right. Create a safe haven for progressives. I was a comment nazi. I banned right-wingers. Very conscious decision to create safe haven for progressives. (WOW.) Says this was instrumental to Kos’s success.
3:56 - Burns: Consistent release schedule critical. Most people have a rotation of 5 sites in their bookmarks. Having a release schedule key to keeping this. RedvsBlue launched a few days before the Iraq war.
4:05 - Coulton: Proliferation of channels can be hard to handle.
4:05 - Westcoat: Schedule time for social media.
4:06 - Kos: 90% of my revenue is ad-based. Subscriptions were just ability to turn ads off. Then book deals and speaking fees. Paid full-time staff of 9 plus contractors. It’s a 7 figure operation.
4:10 - Coulton - 40-50% of revenue is music buying online. Then revenue from live shows and CD sales. This is an unusually high percentage, since he appeals to geeks. I would never have thought to make WoW machinema videos. Was a total accident.
4:14 - Kos: I did 150 polls in 2008. More than any news organization. I will do more this year. R2K / DailyKos poll.
4:15 - Responding to a question if do you advertise. Moderator says that if they do, it’s with cheap Facebook or Google ads. Gaylor says it’s important to have a publicist because MSM peeps are so slammed. It’s still important to have . Anti-marketing vibe on the Internet. “On the Internet people can smell marketing people a mile away.” Kos: Huffington Post, $40 million in VC, and an army of PR people and they’re the biggest news site on the Internet.
4:23 - Burns: Offline marketing worthless for the Internet. If you can’t go to the site right now, it’s worthless. So is “Coming soon…” We were on TRL a few years ago. There was NO IMPACT. Coulton chimes in. NYT piece about him - no impact on his web traffic. But a link from a small blog can make a difference. Traditional media doesn’t believe in linking. (This is very true.)
4:25 - How do you schedule your day? Coulton: be brutal about your schedule. Tuesday is a creative day. Don’t check emails or feeds.
4:26 - Kirsner: MSM journalists looking for phone numbers not emails for instant contact. Coulton: Follow me on Twitter. LOL. Kos: With staff, I can scale back and be more of a family person.

SXSW: Nate Silver Keynote Interview

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:59:18 -0700

1:58 pm - This time I’m early. Keynote interview with Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.
2:04 - Baker’s cheatsheet here. The Numerati (his book) is about statisticians storming into different industries.
2:04 - Silver says 538 was used to procrastinate from other works; borne of frustration at the news media
2:05 - Polls were too much a part of the narrative; he is not a big fan of polls, which are overinterpreted, room for “common sensical expertise” to interpret polls in a way that is more intelligent and meaningful
2:06 - Obama had trouble with working class voters in, let’s say, PA, but not in Oregon or Minnesota which are also working class states.
2:07 - The momentum in the primary dictated by the calendar; states Hillary was bound to do well in voted late; early states were tilted towards Obama. Obama’s primary win partly due to the randomness of the primary calendar.
2:08 - People too quick to assume things are attributable to racial voting patterns. Look at Hispanic vote for Hillary then for Obama.
2:09 - Baker: Demographics is dead; categorize into “behavioral tribes.”
2:10 - Silver: Look at voters at individuals not groups; there are an infinite number of typologies with gradations of like-ness; says Penn’s microtrends is basically BS (YES!)
2:11 - The Silver baseball algorithm is TOTALLY different than his political model. The key to success in both is “good habits.” Being really meticulous. If you really want to solve a problem… go beyond the 80/20 rule; actually push into the hardest 20% and talk about it in a very interesting way. Decisions are made on the margins and simple 80%/20% isn’t enough. Being able to forecast 2% better can save $3-4 million on a $50 million payroll. Detail matters.
2:15 - Baker: did you come upon a “5% difference” that changed your outlook on a state? Silver says in Appalachia people say their ancestry is “American,” a proxy for “redneckness.” This makes a poor voter in Kentucky different than a poor voter in Wisconsin. (”American” voters went heavily for Clinton and McCain more so than national trends.)
2:17 - Baker: “What is Manny Ramirez worth this year?” Silver: He’s a $12-15 million a player and is getting paid twice that. People underestimate how fast players start declining; when a player is in his 30s much more likely to get injured (and lose their will). People assume things won’t change as much as they do.
2:22 - Wifi down. Baker asks about economy; when will people blame Obama. People don’t blame Obama now but in 12-18 months they might. The thing Obama has going for him is non-experts believe the economy will be worse than most economists do. So room to outperform expectations. However, recent recoveries have been jobless recoveries and if the current one follows this pattern Obama could be hurt.
2:23 - A recency problem. Most economists only use the last 10-20 years for modeling but don’t go back further than that to explain current trends.
2:24 - Internet bubble, deleveraging of banks *should* be that predictable; none of us should be that shocked that there were these problems. A few people who did predict this including Schiller and Rubini.
2:25 - Sean Quinn was his correspondent in the field; used to be a field organizer for Jon Tester & Brian Schweitzer. Not enough perspective on what is happening on the ground (organization, field work, data mining, etc.) We’re mostly about the numbers but Quinn’s reporting was useful in differentiating themselves. “Oftentimes it’s where the candidate is NOT that’s important. Obama campaign was working 24 hour shifts in Tallahassee and McCain campaign went home.
2:27 - Quinn was from SF. Picked up a photographer and chronicled the swing states. He was never able to work this into his statistical analysis. One side was anecdotal, the other was quantitative.
2:28 - On the morning of the election, we predicted 98.9% chance of Obama victory. If the 1.1% result came true, were we wrong or unlucky? Likens it to baseball. “What if the player finds Jesus?” Totally random, unexpected things can happen for personal reasons.
2:29 - Q: will you get into human resources? Silver: No. Statistical analysis can’t replace bosses.
2:31 - Q: What would you get a masters degree in that you don’t already? Silver: Computer Science so I wouldn’t have to hire a programmer and could tweak Blogger templates. (Feel your pain!)
2:32 - Q: Would you put your genome up on the Internet? A: Probably not. Goes into privacy. He has a compulsive personality and if he were on Facebook, you’d probably never see him again.
2:33 - The question he faces now if he should take VC financing or keep bootstrapping? (for FiveThirtyEight — a blog!) Always a hard decision. But would be nice to bootstrap.
2:34 - Will he branch out into other areas? He is doing more stuff on the economy. Being asked to predict the Oscars. Did okay, but not that great. Looked at 30 years of Oscar history — based on winners of other awards (Golden Globes, etc.) Those are usually pretty reliable. Academy tends not to like comedy or edgy pictures — likes “big pictures,” epics. Got Best Actor wrong — predicted Rourke over Penn. Said 20% chance of Penn victory, so maybe just unlucky. Said personal factors could have worked against Rourke, who was kind of a jerk to his peers. Also the Prop 8 factor.
2:37 - In Best Supporting Actress, he and everyone else thought Cruz would win not his model. “Never come out with a forecast you know to be wrong. If you know you’ll be wrong, keep working on your f*ing model.” LOL.
2:38 - Now going to talk to people in different fields, everything from fashion design (which can be scientific) to if an asteroid will hit Earth.
2:39 - Going to get into national security? Statistical probability of someone being a terrorist? A: The thing about baseball is you have a perfect data set; the real world is not like that. Not like looking at a needle in a haystack, but looking for a needle in a bunch of needles.
2:41 - Thinks it’s impressive we have not had a major attack since 9/11.
2:43 - Baseball more predictable than basketball, football b/c it’s less self-centered and everyone takes their turn.
2:44 - Audience Q&A. How did you solve the data problem? Polls not as reliable as baseball data. Silver: Baseball collection not that difficult to do. Fundraising primary was a predictor. Obama collected twice as much money as Hillary in Colorado, predictor of caucus vote.
2:46 - Q: What does 538 stand for (duh). Silver says # of votes in EC but misstates that DC would get an extra vote and it would go to 539. Actually Utah would get the extra vote. What do you read? Reads a lot of books halfway through.
2:49 - What would happen if McCain won? A: smaller stimulus package; more interesting is what if Hillary had won? Obama was inexperienced; maybe having someone in the WH before might have helped (Hillary) Do you think the Netflix challenge is interesting? Doesn’t get to this question, but it’s a good one.
2:50 - Have you read Richard Fenno’s work on Congress?
2:52 - Doesn’t business also have perfect data? Disagrees that business has good data; companies cook the books and report their own results. If he knew, he’d work in hedge funds. Even gov’t economic statistics are imprecise. Improve the data quality before applying better predictive modeling.
2:54 - Should the EC be abolished? Silver takes the 5th. It’s good for his website. LOL.
2:55 - Silver thinks the stock market has behaved irrationally despite the fact that it’s a top prediction market.
2:56 - Prediction markets better for information that is hard to quantify like the Oscars. For politics, statistical analysis and prediction markets fairly well matched.
2:57 - Irish dude says he runs a prediction market (InTrade?) Uses the Hillary NH example. Blame data when things go wrong, when things go right, you were right.
3:00 - Pollsters getting more responsible about including crosstabs. Amen.

SXSW: Building a Great Company Culture

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 09:41:02 -0700

11:39 - Just settled in here at the Hilton.
11:39 - Don’t just take money but do a thorough reference check on VCs.
11:39 - Likens employees to kids; same carrot / stick analogy. Analogizing employer / employee relationship to a family.
11:40 - Read “Good to Great.” (YES!) Best business book to read. (YES!)
11:42 - Talks about maintaining a company culture.
11:43 - Questioner: key challenge is alignment. How do you keep everyone aligned? Top-down or bottom-up?
11:44 - Quotes Tony Hsieh saying “Hire slowly. Fire quickly.”
11:45 - “Know the endgame” (Yes). “You’ve got to overcommunicate. Bring your team in. Show them where they fit in. Be 100% candid.”
11:46 - “What is the journey? What is the crusade? How do they fit in? No one wants a paycheck. That sucks. Figure out what the intangibles are that these guys can be inspired by.”
11:46 - Event detail page.
11:49 - “Are they here for a paycheck? Or are they inspired?” (That’s the $64,000 question.) “Anybody who loses their passion is screwed. Because it sucks.”
11:52 - @MindyFinn: “Lead by example.” So important but also why managers have awesome responsibility. Like parents. And teachers. #sxsw
11:53 - A department of Boundless wasn’t firing on all cylinders. They imposed discipline. 8am conference calls. Now they’re firing.
11:57 - Audience member: All employees must have a sense that they contributed to the purpose of the company. “That has carried us.”
12:07 - Dropped off to do some e-mail.
12:08 - Mindy is asking a question about employees who are your age or older seeing you as the “parent.” Answer: displace the personality. Make it about the business metrics.
12:13 - Observation from the crowd: Company culture takes on the personality of the founder. This is terrifying for some.
12:14 - Book suggestion: “The Starfish and the Spider.”
12:20 - This is actually the most enlightening panel so far. Mostly soaking it in not writing though
12:20 - When you feel like you have to copy a lot of people, or invite a lot of people to meetings, there is not clear accountability and ownership. This is so true. The largest meetings are the least productive.
12:27 - Twitter in corporate culture. How do you connect your personal twitter to your corporate one? What if someone badmouths their work on their personal social media accounts?

Mindy’s Twitter Stream: