From The Washington Post, 5/21/07:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/20/AR2007052001408_pf.html
Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up
Democrats Have Big Edge on Web
By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007; A01
When David All, a former Republican congressional aide, launched a
blog recently that he hopes will spur his fellow Republicans to bridge
the digital divide, he did his best to sound upbeat.
"Today our Revolution begins," he wrote. "Tomorrow we fight."
But implicit in his cheerleading was the acknowledgment that there is
a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Internet, and
that his party will have to scramble to catch up.
"For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," he
said in an interview.
Another Republican -- Michael Turk, who was in charge of Internet
strategy for President Bush's 2004 campaign -- puts the problem his
party faces more bluntly:
"We're losing the Web right now."
The most recent figures from Nielsen/NetRatings provide one measure of
the gap.
Looking at the Web sites of presidential candidates from the two
parties, it found that former senator John Edwards's site had about
690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat's wife, Elizabeth,
announced that she had a recurrence of cancer.
That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the
three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John
McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).
There are other measures as well.
No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another
Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, on YouTube,
MySpace and Facebook, the social-networking triumvirate.
The Democrats are ahead in the online money race.
The top three Democrats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama and
Edwards, amassed more than $14 million over the Internet in the first
three months of 2007; in contrast, the top three Republicans,
Giuliani, McCain and Romney, collected less than half of that, $6
million.
Furthermore, ABC PAC, the conservative fundraising site, has raised
$385 so far for Republican presidential hopefuls; Act Blue, its
liberal counterpart, has collected about $3 million for Edwards alone.
One reason for the disparity between the parties, political insiders
say, is that the top Republican candidates are not exciting voters the
way the Democratic front-runners are.
Another is that it takes a certain level of technical skill and
understanding to be an online strategist, and Republicans admit that
"the pool of talent in the Democrats' side is much bigger than ours."
But an underlying cause may be the nature of the Republican Party and
its traditional discipline -- the antithesis of the often chaotic,
bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet.
"We've always been a party of staying on message," All said.
"It's the Rush Limbaugh model. What Tony Snow says in the White House
filters down to talk radio, which makes its way to the blogs."
Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a San
Francisco-based think tank that in recent months has been advising
Democratic members of Congress and their staffs on how to take full
advantage of the Web, argues that the culture of Democrats is a much
better fit in the Internet world.
"What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in
the past -- they couldn't get 20 people to agree to the same thing,
they could never finish anything, they couldn't stay on message -- is
now an asset," Leyden said.
"All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone,
involves everyone, and gets people totally into it."
If conservatives have mastered talk radio -- with Limbaugh as the
undisputed king of the AM dial -- those on the left hope to achieve
the same dominance on the Internet.
Daily Kos, a sounding board for opposition to Bush and the Iraq war,
among other topics, leads most political blogs in Web traffic and
notoriety.
Last year, the site spawned Yearly Kos, the first political blogger
convention.
Its founder, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, refers to himself as the site's
"mayor," with everyone else "doing their own thing, managing their own
projects, while I keep the plumbing running."
Moulitsas will concede the influence of conservative blogs and Web
sites in the successful attack on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during
his 2004 presidential campaign, when he was accused of exaggerating
his service record during the Vietnam War, and on CBS News for its
reporting on Bush's war record.
He also concedes that Republicans have their own popular blogs, such
as InstaPundit, RedState and Michelle Malkin's -- sites, he asserts,
that are parts "of the Republican noise machine, affiliated to talk
radio and Fox News."
Malkin, the doyenne of the conservative blogosphere, is a frequent
contributor to Fox News.
"Sure, conservatives can point to the Dan Rather controversy and the
Swift boat episode as a measure of their success online. But that's
it," Moulitsas said.
"Progressives can lay claim to an actual movement that raises a lot of
money, that helps put politicians in office. . . . Progressives can
claim to actually having communities online, where an average Joe can
have a voice, and not just a radio personality who happens to write a
blog, too."
Moulitsas was referring to Hugh Hewitt, a blogger and host of "The
Hugh Hewitt Show."
His blog is on TownHall, one of the most popular conservative sites.
The site is owned by Salem Communications.
While Democrat Howard Dean is credited with being the first
presidential candidate to have an effective Internet strategy, it was
McCain who in his losing campaign for the 2000 Republican nomination
showed how effective the Internet could be in fundraising.
And Republicans are hardly conceding the fight in the 2008 campaign.
Besides TechRepublican, the group blog started two weeks ago by All,
who worked as communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.),
there is QubeTV, founded in March as an alternative to what one of its
founders, Charlie Gerow, a former Reagan campaign aide, calls "the
liberal bias" of YouTube.
A virtual conservative Main Street, QubeTV asks its users to "stay on
guard" and to submit video clips of the "next botched joke," referring
to Kerry's comment about U.S. troops.
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uh huh
Harry
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