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

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.

More details in this post, The Drudge Report Meets Twitter: The TCOT Report http://bit.ly/nzac