Exactly Right

Patrick Ruffini, writing over at Hugh Hewitt's blog, has a masterful analysis of what the right has gotten right – and wrong – on the web.

Who is jealous of who here? YearlyKos, and also the Take Back America Conference, were almost certainly borne of the question “Where is our CPAC?” Some of those covering this act as though the idea of a conference with thousands of grassroots activists and Presidential candidates falling all over themselves to speak is totally unheard of on the right. Um, no. The netroots was built on Xeroxing the Goldwater-Reagan Revolution in the Republican Party. Almost always, it was conservatives who were the initial innovators.

When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.

The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.

And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Do read it all. It actually gives voice to a few things I have been thinking about recently. Many of us on the right side of the 'sphere tend to act as "pseudo-journalists and commentators" as Ruffini puts it. Not activists but pundits. The traffic, as Ruffini points out, still favors the right, but the activism is over on the left. Mark Tapscott, commenting on Ruffini's post puts it this way:

Having said that, let me also add this: Let's not forget that, despite our handicaps in recent years, the digital Right has compiled some significant victories. Just ask Dan Rather, Ted Stevens and Trent Lott what they think of those conservative bloggers.

We also get a major share of the credit for Coburn-Obama, the bill mandating creation of a Google-like, searchable database on the Internet of most federal spending. True, it was a Left-Right coalition that got that bill through Congress. But most of the Internet advocacy and activism on behalf of Coburn-Obama came from the Right and it was the conservative Tom Coburn who provided the critical legislative energy and recognized the potential power of the Blogosphere as a key to gaining success.

Still, it's like an Indy 500 that never ends – we led the first 10 laps, but while we were waving to the crowd, the Left turned up its turbo boost and blew by us. We better wake up and get back in this race before it's too late.

Interesting, isn't it?