Dear Dad: You Lost the Election Because the GOP FailWhaled on the Web
by Kara Swisher
Posted on February 20, 2009 at 1:45 AM PT
Almost-First Daughter Meghan McCain (pictured here) gave the Republican Party the analog equivalent of an unhappy emoticon 
yesterday in a column in The Daily Beast, predicting the political party will lose power quicker than a faulty iPhone if it does not get more Web-savvy pronto.
BoomTown always liked GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s sassy spawn, who had a pretty good blog–deliciously called McCain Blogette.com: Musings on Politics From a Pop CultureGirl–during the campaign and was always coming out with some little nugget that I am sure made her PR handlers cringe.
Well, there she goes again!
In a post titled, “Why Republicans Don’t Get the Internet,” Meghan McCain noted flatly:
The Republican party isn’t exactly Internet savvy. That’s no secret…This has been a source of personal frustration for me for a very long time. Unless the GOP evolves as the party that can successfully utilize the Web, we’ll continue to lose influence.”
Thankfully, it gets worse!
Writes Meghan:
I know this aggravates the old school political operatives to no end, but it’s true. The Obama administration understands that my generation spends most of its day on a laptop or a BlackBerry, and that using the web is easy way to communicate their ideas to their constituents. Making a website, Facebook group, or YouTube video entertaining and enticing is where grassroots campaigning begins. President Obama currently has around five-and-a-half million supporters on Facebook; my father has around five-hundred thousand.”
Sorry, Dad!
But apparently not all that much, because she ended her piece with a zinger about the GOP’s new Web effort, the Rebuild the Party site, essentially declaring the party a wizened Luddite with no hopes of ever beating the BlackBerry-loving Obama.
…The website is about as provocative as a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. At the time that I write this, the video on the homepage features various individuals, most of them I would guess between the ages of fifty and sixty, explaining why they consider themselves Republicans. Had I still been an independent, there is nothing about this website or video that would sway me as a twenty-four year old woman to join the GOP…Until the Republican party joins the twenty-first century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side.”
Meghan McCain is definitely right about the unusually sleepy video–which only pops when they focus on dead Republican former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt:
Comments
One thing Meghan overlooks is the growing grassroots conservative movement on Twitter. The #TCOT Report is both a hashtag community, and a site that aggregates news. Karl Rove and Michelle Malkin are part of this Twitter community.
More details in this post, The Drudge Report Meets Twitter: The TCOT Report http://bit.ly/nzac
Posted by Hutch Carpenter at February 20th, 2009 at 7:49 amBad news for Republicans, but McCain-Palin could have had the ultimate online operation, and they still would have had little chance at victory in 2008.
The Republican Party’s problem is that they’re not communicating compelling ideas. “Return to Reagan” isn’t a strategy; it’s nostalgia. Everything in the world seems worse than it did under Clinton, and the GOP hasn’t demonstrated that they understand how the world has changed since then. They’re too busy chasing ghosts.
Posted by Eric Meyerson at February 20th, 2009 at 11:40 amIt’s certainly necessary to embrace the new tools provided by the Internet to get the message out (and raise funds), but it is also necessary to get the message right. It is also necessary for there to be a receptive audience for that message, and I’m afraid in these times that just isn’t the case.
Who would have guessed before the election that an Obama administration would look like an amalgam of the previous two administrations, with most Bush policies being doubled down and with former Clinton appointees presiding over it all?
Too little was done by the media during this election to find out what the candidates actual positions were on specific issues, and in any case the candidates were able to get away with platitudes instead of direct answers.
Obama certainly used the Internet to raise money and rally people who would have probably voted for him anyway (if they voted at all), but as Valleywag pointed out yesterday, the architects of Obama’s Internet victory have been largly ignored since the election.
The Internet makes it easier for the public to flood the White House and Congress with opinions and questions, but it only obfuscates the fact that RESPONSES to those messages are largely coming from clerical workers who have no inside information and may in fact be 180 off from the candidate’s view on a particular subject.
With attention spans shortened by an order of magnitude, maybe the only way for citizens to “get” the importance of particular policy decisions is to actually live through the ramifications of them being decided incorrectly.
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Mac (still waiting for Obama’s scalpel to come out) Beach
Posted by Mac Beach at February 20th, 2009 at 1:12 pm