An article on Financial Times (FT.com) caught my eye today. The article, for reference, can be found here. The gist of the article is that social networking sites are creating small social circles over shared ideas. No surprise there. Search the net for nearly any subject you wish and you will find it. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people will naturally gravitate to those with whom that can share an interest.
That is great your saying, but what does this have to do with me?
Simply put, the blogging and social networking revolution is going to increase the number of the people who are dissatisfied with the current political system. User-generated content has changed they way people interact. No longer do you have to seek to conform your views to a single talk-show host or party leader- your views, thanks to the availability of publishing mediums, can be spread as effectively as the ‘party bosses’ view can.
Don’t get me wrong- the political parties still have the upper hand, after all the Government/Media Complex will ensure that their message gets repeated as ‘breaking news’ or re-regurgitated in some form or another. But traditional media outlets are losing audiences. Newspaper subscriptions are down. Cable is reaching its saturation point in the American market. And even radio is undergoing to struggles as it seeks to compete with digital music players and satellite radio.
In short, the political parties can no longer count on controlling the message. Messages, information and opinions are controlled by the blogs, the people, the individual consumer now. Ask Larry Craig if he was able to control his message that he, “is not gay, or ever has been gay’. All it takes is one Google search to realize that the peoples voice far outweighs that of some pre-recorded press statement.
Mark Penn, an adviser for Hillary Clinton who wrote the book, “Microtrends: the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes” calls for political parties to capture these small opinionated groups in an attempt to use the shifting synergy to organize a political movement. While I despise Clinton, it would seem that her adviser is just as fresh on what it takes to capture the vote as George W Bush was when he brought Karl Rove on board to his campaign.
Karl Rove wrote in an article that I read when Bush was running for re-election in 2004 that, ‘You have to capture the voter where they are at’. The problem is only magnified for any Presidential contender running in 2008. So how can political parties maintain their agenda if they no longer control the mediums by which their message is spread? The answer may be as simple as being added as a ‘friend’ to their voters political MySpace reality.
Currently, the Republican party is one of its biggest fundraising crises that it has ever seen. The Presidents approval rating is below 30% and many conservative voters are not just dis-contented with the Presidential candidates for the GOP, they are angry. The message, as hounded by the party elite is ‘the war on terror’. The problem is, of course, this has been unpopular since the beginning. The President, as Commander in Chief, is rightly taking the brunt of the outrages.
Now let me ask this- with the President serving as the media’s ‘whipping block’ against the war, why exactly is the Party insisting on staying ‘on message’? Building the Republican base up is going to take allot of work, and a White House driven message will be the least efficient way to bring conservative and moderate voters back under the same tent. In order to restore trust in the GOP, the party is going to have to let the voters choose the parties message going into the next election.
Many pundits were ’surprised’ by John McCain’s sharp plummet in the polls. Why? Do they not see the same trends that Karl Rove and Mark Penn have been talking about for years? McCain alienated and angered nearly all factions of the Republican party over the last few years. In fact, you could go as far as to say that the main reason for nearly all of the Republican fundrasing troubles in new, small money donors lies at the feet of legislation pushed by McCain.
I am talking about the amnesty issue. The political base of the GOP is in absolute revolt over what they feel is a ‘core issue’ to them. Public health care is another issue that the conservative base of the Republican party does not support, and yet again, you see nearly all the the GOP candidates offering some asinine plan that they say with benefit ‘the children’. It is an absolute catch-22. In order to the Government/Media Complex to air a story on on your campaign you have to endorse their viewpoints, and yet when you endorse those viewpoints you leave your political base throughly unenthusiastic about their choices.
I will predict this: the first of the mainstream candidates to come out AGAINST amnesty with qualifications and AGAINST public health care of any sort with see an instant bump in their poll numbers. More modern metrics of ‘buzz’ around a candidate include ‘blog activity indexes’ such as that of Wonkosphere. I will also predict that much of the blogging world would get behind the GOP Presidental candidate that reflectes their conservite blog message- we want aPresidentialreflectsconservative return of the smaller government, pro-America GOP. That means no amnesty and no expansion of SCHIP or any other ‘public health insurance’.
You want to know how and why Ron Paul raisied $5 million in a single quater despite being only a small blip in the polls? Simple- He has a massive blog and internet movement dedicated to his message. And that message happens to be one that the voters have chosen to be the issue of importance to them. Not political calculations to bring the ‘minority vote’ on board or the ‘pro-healthcare’ vote into the mix.
As you can see, the only real answer to the ‘user generated’ political system that our founders put into place is a return to philosophy, ideology and issue driven politicking. The days of the ‘political stragegists’ being able to define the issues for the voter are over, as can been seen by the revolt over the amensty issue. Party leaders, strategists and the candidates themselves would be wise to take up the issues the voters want, or continue down the road of mediocrity and not living up to expectations. And yes that means Guiliani, who is often labeled as a ‘New York Republican’ faces virtually no chance in the Republican primary, as voters see right though such politically correct qualifications.
I will end it this way as food for thought- Do you really believe that a Republican voter in the mid-west would add McCain or Guilliani, pro-amnesty and abortion candidates, to his politcal ‘friends list’? The awnser, based on polls and fundraising, is a definate no. Republican leaders, take notice.