Category: Politics and Grassroots

Over the water’s edge

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

After a weekend out of town and out of the loop, I woke up to news video footage of President Obama addressing a press conference at the NATO summit.  I had to track down the exact quote because it seemed so unbelievable:

Sounding frustrated on the last day of the NATO summit, Obama said military officials, senior members of past Republican administrations and European states backed the treaty with Russia…“There is no other reason not to do it other than the fact that Washington has become a very partisan place,” Obama said.

There’s a lot going on here.

Of course, there’s the crutch of partisanship as an argument – as if Democrats don’t reflexively balk at ideas that are proven to work when proposed by a Republican.

But more disturbing is the argument that petty bickering from another side is stalling the work of the American government.  It’s a fine political argument when making a stump speech intended to motivate supporters and convince independents, but a wholly different animal when delivered on foreign soil.

If it weren’t for the TSA controversy, conservative pundits would likely be all over the President for this comment.

Project Titan: A new generation of Facebook messaging. And probably SPAM.

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Facebook announced “Project Titan” this week.  With a code name like that, one might have wished for the press conference to open with Mark Zuckerberg bellowing, “Welcome to the world of tomorrow!”

Unfortunately, there was no such bellow.

There was, however, an unveiling of a drastically revamped Facebook messaging service.   The new interface is supposed to allow users to integrate Facebook’s internal traditional messaging and chat features, but what really sticks out is the entry of Facebook email address into the equation.

This is the biggest opening of Facebook’s walled garden yet.  And aside from the obvious possibility of an email client (like Microsoft’s Outlook) operating as your Facebook inbox, there’s the possibility that a person – or, more likely, a campaign or company – can send you a Facebook message as easily as they send an email.  It could open the door for mass-messaging through the Facebook environment – even though Facebook is taking steps to keep that from happening.

For all their efforts, though, the fact is that there are plenty of campaigns and companies who want to seize upon Facebook data just to have another avenue of communication – and a good Facebook app can expose this data pretty easily, with the user’s tacit permission.  Most likely, Project Titan is not the final iteration of Facebook’s messaging platform.

Anuzis highlights tech experience

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

After announcing his bid for the RNC chair last week by highlighting Michael Steele’s shortcomings in fundraising and the ground game, Saul Anuzis predictably started highlighting his tech-friendly background as a point of difference between him and the incumbent.

“It’s critical we integrated new media into everyday politics. It works, it’s efficient and we need to do it,” Anuzis told The Hill when contacted over the weekend. He also said his candidacy has already sparked enthusiasm among social networking aficianados.

What will excite online activists even more is that Anuzis isn’t making the election all about technology to begin with.  His initial announcement dealt with main, overarching problems he saw in the RNC.  Anuzis then brought up technology as a response to how he would deal with those problems.

Whether or not he is ultimately successful, arguing for technology as a means rather than an end prevents Anuzis from being labeled as a niche “tech candidate” and positions him as a more serious challenger.

There might be money in mobile (literally)

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The FEC is thinking about allowing contributions via text message in a ruling expected this fall, allowing campaigns to capitalize on the same small-dollar, high-volume donation campaigns that worked so well for American Red Cross efforts in Haiti.

The potential for campaigns is fairly obvious – campaign rallies, events, and even media appearances could become fundraising opportunities.   But consider the fact that few campaigns spent lots of time collecting mobile numbers in 2010.  How many members of this year’s House freshman class will regret a lack of investment in mobile for the 2010 election when they begin their 2012 reelection efforts?

Anuzis challenges Steele

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

The Weekly Standard caught a tweet from Saul Anuzis, the former Michigan Republican Party chairman, saying he will again run for RNC Chair.  He will probably not be the only challenger to incumbent Michael Steele.

Steele seemed like a good fit for the job when he bested five rivals – including Anuzis – in January 2009 in a grueling, multi-ballot race.  He provided much-needed racial diversity to the ranks of the Republican talking heads and brought blue-state credibility.  On the heels of the 2008 shellacking, the Republicans badly needed to demonstrate they were more than a party of white southerners.

From the beginning, there were whispers about Steele’s lack of conservative street cred.  Where Steele has drawn criticism, though, has been in the “blocking and tackling” – the basic elements of a party chair’s job, like fundraising and building a GOTV infrastructure.  (In fact, Anuzis uses just that term.)  After a six-way race for the chairmanship, criticism was inevitable for whoever won, but Steel made it easier.  The whispers in Republican circles (which “unnamed sources” give voice to in the Weekly Standard piece) is that the 2010 gains should have been bigger.

In his announcement, Anuzis channels the 2008 McCain campaign (which poked at then-candidate Obama’s quasi-celebrity status):

My agenda is very straightforward. I have no interest in running for office. I won’t be writing a book.  It is not my goal to be famous. However, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who will work harder, more diligently and be more committed to electing Republicans from the top to every township and city across this great country of ours.

It isn’t worth including at this point in the campaign, but Anuzis has another bullet left in his chamber: his background in digital politics.  As the race for RNC chair heats up, look for Anuzis to use this – accompanied by criticism of the failed initial launch of GOP.com – to separate himself from the pack.

Dumbphones, Presidential campaigns, and mobile politics

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

The Republican primary campaigns for President of the United States are – let’s face it – already underway.  That means tactical discussion are coming soon – the term “tactical discussion” being defined as giddy blog posts about who is using what new toys – and that will include a discussion of mobile phone strategy.

But in this realm, it may not be the new toys that win out, but new uses for old toys.  Dumbphones – i.e., cell phones that aren’t tiny pocket computers like the Droids and the iPhones of the world – are outselling their smartphone brethren by a rate of four to one and inspiring creative, text-message based usage.

Outside of Carly Fiorina’s losing bid to unseat Senator Barbara Boxer, there were few high-profile examples of campaigns incorporating mobile technologies.  And given the lack of smartphone penetration, fancy apps aren’t always as wise an investment for campaigns, which target broad sections of the electorate, as they are for institutions like think tanks, which are trying to reach media and other thought leaders.

Still, the vast majority of phones on the market are capable of text messaging – and in fact, three out of four mobile users use this feature, compare to less than one out of three who use smartphone apps.  This math says that if a Presidential campaign is looking to be smart with its mobile strategy, they should think dumb.

You can’t keep the People’s Seat without the people

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Politico points to dismal results for Republicans in Massachusetts as a good indication that Scott Brown might not be a Senator much longer.  But a post by NRO’s Jim Geraghty recounting some intelligence from New England indicates that it may be more than the Bay State’s penchant for Democrats at play.

Geraghty’s source talks about the unified effort that Democrats and their organized labor allies made in contacting nearly a million voters to stave off another Brown-esque upset.  But the phenomenon is not exclusive to Massachusetts.  For example, in Nevada, Washington, and Colorado Democrats defended vulnerable Senate seats by outperforming opinion polls that showed either a tie or a Republican advantage.

When Brown won his election, it had much to do with enthused Republican activists (nationally as well as in Massachusetts) sensing an opportunity and paying lots of attention to the race by making phone calls or going door to door to recruit voters.  In past midterm elections, the the Republican 72-hour Task Force would do the necessary grunt work to get voters to the polls.  That effort was missing this year – and nothing takes it’s place in 2012, Brown may not be the only Republican Senator in trouble.

Same election, two messages

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

In the week of fallout since the most recent ground-shaking election day, Democrats and Republicans alike have been on the airwaves, trying to put it in context.  But have you looked at their postmortems side-by-side?

Marco Rubio owned the GOP message on election night:

But we know that tonight, the power in the United States House of Representatives will change hands. We know tonight that a growing number of Republicans will now serve in the Senate as well. And we make a grave mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party.

What they are is a second chance. A second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago. You see, I learned early on in this campaign – in fact it’s what propelled me to enter it – that what this race was about was about the great future that lies ahead for our country, a future that Americans know is there for the taking. But it requires actions on our part.

The theme of the Majority That Lost Its Way has been a consistent message for Republicans since 2006 – in fact, less than a year into the Pelosi Era, Rep. Tom Feeney argued that a philosophically adrift GOP had squandered its power:

We lost the majority in 2006 because Republicans could no longer convince voters that we were the party of fiscal restraint and traditional values. Polls in the closing days of the last election showed that a majority of voters felt that Democrats were more trustworthy when it came to issues of spending, taxation and general economic development — that we could no longer be trusted to fight for the limited government and personal freedom that have always been cornerstones of our party’s beliefs.

Contrast that to the Democrats’ lines about “what it all meant” – including the President, who has been vocal in chalking up the Democrats’ failures to messaging strategy:

What I didn’t effectively, I think, drive home, is that we were taking these steps not because of some theory that we wanted to expand government. It was because we had an emergency situation and we wanted to make sure the economy didn’t go off a cliff. I think the Republicans were able to paint my governing philosophy as a classic, traditional, big government liberal. And that’s not something that the American people want.

The first obvious thing is that Republicans, even now, seem contrite for driving the car into the ditch when they held most of the keys from 2001-2007.  Since Democrats haven’t had the benefit of time – and still have the responsibility of governing – contrition may simply be a luxury they can’t afford at the moment.  Still, the difference in where each party lays blame for still-somewhat-recent losses is stark: Republicans blame themselves for not living up to the expectations of the people, Democrats blame the perception that they didn’t meet expectations.

Another underlying current worth noting in all of these quotes is that, despite apparent sea change in the election of 2008, America remains a nation that trends philosophically toward smaller government – with both parties trying to frame their arguments through that prism.

 

Do you still get this joke?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

FedEx is spending lots of money on online advertising hammering away at an proposed regulatory change that would benefit UPS.  Using the parlance of our times, they are calling it the “Brown Bailout” – since the term “bailout” has such high negative connotations.

I’ve criticized this campaign before for tactical flaws – many of which have been corrected in the year since it launched.  And the people in charge of the campaign messages have always done a good job of explaining a complex issue completely in a simple – and funny – way with great videos.

But here’s the rub: those videos, while once effective, are outdated.  Those UPS whiteboard commercials are two or three years old, and the company has moved to an ad campaign which highlights “logistics.”  If FedEx’s government affairs division wanted to really hammer UPS, the new ads are quite mockable.

By recycling a year-old campaign, FedEx is taking a shortcut.  It would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight – but luckily for them, UPS is bringing a whiffle bat.  In the year and a half since FedEx has been running the Brown Bailout campaign, the best UPS could muster is this visually thrilling online press kit that could serve as that antidote to caffeine scientists have been searching for:

 

 

Stewart/Colbert rally demonstrates government competence levels

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

As Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were wrapping up their apolitical comedy and music show last, their crowd unwittingly demonstrated the reason many people are suspect of government running things like health care.  Just after Stewart’s closing keynote, an errant DC Metro escalator at L’Enfant Plaza sped up and start spitting folks off, injuring four to six freshly-sane rally goers.

Luckily, Metro’s crack administrative staff was prepared since, according to Unsuck DC Metro (the best-titled blog in the history of the internet), a report issued a month before the rally detailed the issues with escalator brakes throughout the system.