Establishment Republicans are using the GOP’s election losses as an excuse to declare conservatism dead. But it wasn’t conservatism that was rejected by the people; it was Republicans who rejected conservatism who were rejected.

Last week, Nevada state Sen. Warren Hardy (R-Las Vegas) declared that Republicans have to run moderate candidates who can attract Democrat voters if they ever want to win again. You know, like moderate John McCain (lost), moderate Rep. Jon Porter (lost) and moderate state Sen. Joe Heck (lost). Great strategy, Senator.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio (R-Reno) declared that the Republican Party has “gone too far to the right.” The moderate Republican added that the “far right message does not sell.”

Really?

Conservative Nevada Rep. Dean Heller – who, unlike moderate Jon Porter, voted against the $700 billion Wall Street bailout – won handily. And at least six ballot measures to raise taxes were crushed by Nevada voters last week. So it’s not that the conservative message won’t sell, it’s that too many Republicans aren’t selling it. Instead, they’re selling us Democrat Lite.

Many of you will remember Lyn Nofziger. He was a close adviser to Ronald Reagan dating back to his days as governor of California. And without question, Lyn would be considered “too far right” by establishment Republicans today. Here’s how Lyn defined what it meant to be a conservative…

“Allowing for differences I would define a conservative, first as one who believes in the Constitution as it is written. That takes care of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to petition the government, the right to keep and bear arms and, in the words of William O. Douglas in one of his saner moments, ‘the right to be let alone.’

“Second, a conservative believes in small, limited government at every level. Along with this he believes strongly in individual responsibility. That is, a person or a family should take care of itself and turn for help to government only when all other means have been exhausted. It also means that society, before government, has a duty to take care of its own. Government should be a resource of last resort.

“Third, a conservative believes taxes should be levied for the purpose of financing the limited responsibilities of government such as providing for the common defense, catching and incarcerating criminals, minting money and filling potholes. Taxes should not be levied for the purpose of redistributing wealth.

“That’s about it. I know there are those who say a conservative should be pro-life, which I am, but I’m not sure a person has to be that to qualify as a conservative. Nor am I sure that a person must be opposed to pornography, which I am. In both cases there are questions of individual rights and responsibilities which are arguable.

“One other thing I think a conservative believes is that the parents, not government, are and should be responsible for the upbringing and behavior of their children.”

Now you tell me voters won’t “buy” that message. If Republicans would only run on that common-sense, all-American conservative platform - and then govern like they meant it once in office - not only would it “sell,” but our state and the country would better off for it.

Or Republicans can take Sen. Hardy’s and Sen. Raggio’s advice and water-down their philosophical beliefs just to get elected. But riddle me this, Batman: Why should voters vote for a Republican who’s only going to grow government a little slower than the Democrats and raise taxes a little less than the Democrats? I mean, if you’re going to hell in a hand-basket, wouldn’t you prefer to get the ride over with as quickly as possible?

Nevada Republicans have come to that proverbial fork in the road. It’s gut-check time. Will they veer off to the Left with Sen. Hardy and Sen. Raggio, or will they bear to the common-sense Right with Lyn Nofziger and Dean Heller? Decisions, decisions.

Written By: Chuck Muth

The discussion on the right over the past few weeks, with regards to the state of the center-right movement online, has been fascinating to say the least. The way the Obama team took the most successful offline community organization campaign our country as ever seen and blended it in to a flawless online infrastructure, that in turn translated in to offline political success, has left many on the right scratching their heads.

Often times, especially over the last few years, the right has gotten far too caught up in the ?we’re behind online? chant. In doing so, we’ve completely been ran over by a true collaborative movement that we don’t understand, nor do many of us seem willing to explore.

Last month, while speaking on a panel at AFP Summit in Washington, D.C., I caused a stir with a few friends of mine in political circles by claiming that we aren’t at all behind online. In fact, one could argue that we’re running right alongside the left when it comes to technology and the tools it provides.

Let’s take a look at some of the sites and tools on both sides.

Daily KOS vs. RedState
Daily KOS is still THE MOST read political blog on the web. It’s a diary site where anyone can start a blog and throw their voice in to the mix. Well, RedState not only provides the same platform, RedState provides a BETTER platform.

Indeed, RedState is clean, crisp, well designed, 2.0, and on and on and on. I would argue that apart from traffic, RedState is a much better site than Daily KOS.

Act Blue vs. Slate Card
Act Blue raises millions of dollars for liberal campaigns. Slate Card, a new system, but one that is state-of-the-art with a plethora of features that should be embraced by the entire right online, hasn’t been able to come anywhere close to the level of fundraising currently enjoyed by Act Blue.

Digg.com vs. R-igg.com
Love or hate Digg, you have to admit that liberal eActivists have been able to pass around enormous web influence using Digg.com. If you’ve been on the front page of Digg, and I have, you know that a link there is worth at least 15,000 unique visits within a few hours.

The left has been able to master the art of finding a small liberal blog with 20 or so visitors a day, and almost instantly, using Digg, take that blogger to stardom. I mean, depending on the title, the time of day, and the amount of Diggs, a front page story can result in thousands of new feed subscribers, hundreds of new bookmarks, and tens of thousands of new readers.

And while Digg.com isn’t necessarily ?liberal owned?, the left has dominated the Digg community and the right has done very little as a collaborative effort to respond. When will we realize that we too can be VERY competitive in this realm?

We actually DO have a site on our own site that uses the Digg philosophy of crowd powered news over at R-igg.com. R-igg was developed by a brilliant young mind of the right in Aaron Marks. But there has been no collaborative movement to help it reach critical mass. Why not? How hard can it be for 500 center-right eActivists to collaborate and help this Beta site rise in predominance?

Answer = not hard at all. All it takes is mass collaboration.

There are many, MANY more sites and tools that I could talk about here, but hopefully you get the point. And that point is that we have the technology know how on our side. We understand the tools, we get social media (just look at #dontgo and how it started on Twitter, for example), and we know what our political goal is.

Why can’t we achieve political success as an online movement then?
In my opinion, it is because we fail in the collaboration realm. But before I can explain why I feel that is, let’s look at some efforts from our friends on the left.

Twitter Vote Report
I had the privilege of being on the Google Group as well as the wiki for the Twitter Vote Report Project. Mad props go out to the collaborative effort it took to develop this resource, and being in early on helped me realize just how badly we’ve missed the boat.

About a week before election night, if you were to visit the Twitter Vote Report website you would have seen… wait for it… nothing. It wasn’t there. There were a few people working on putting a blueprint together, but for the most part, it had yet to come in to existence.

Then, all of a sudden, and seemingly out of nowhere, the beta site goes live. The very first design, as it went live, was basic and almost looked like a blank canvass. But, the second this group saw the project and realized the vision behind it, they dropped EVERYTHING and attacked the project like a pack of wolves.

They instantly had a VOLUNTEER team developing code using JSON and the Twitter API, they had developers writing code for the iPhone application, they had coders cleaning up the site framework and streamlining the system, they had graphic designers working to design a visually appealing and professional template, they had organizers building teams of grassroots ?promoters?, and they had groups/organizations coming on as sponsors to help spread the word about the project.

They built this all for FREE. Then, they let us all use it… for FREE!

Mass collaboration designed, developed, and marketed a major web activism project in less than a week, with no cost attached.

Now I know the argument many on the right will provide because I’ve heard it time and time again. ?But I don’t work for free… I have to put food on the table?. No offense to my friends on the right who do this for a living, but that sort of thinking is archaic and outdated. A dying frame of mind, if you will.

Just because you work for free does not mean you don’t get paid. As a Capitalist, I’m all about making money, but I believe the financial reward is there when I least expect it.

Let’s look at a recent post by Seth Godin, a guy whom I’ve studied for years and have great respect for in the marketing world.

Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.

The essence is this: connect.

But is it really that simple? YES! In fact, I actually HIRED a guy who was working on some coding for the collaborative project mentioned above to help me code a script last week. I never would have known he existed, nor would I have seen his work had I not watched him work to build a powerful FREE tool for the online community.

Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value.

* Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
* Connect job hunters with jobs.
* Connect information seekers with information.
* Connect teams to each other.
* Connect those seeking similar.
* Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
* Connect people who are proximate geographically.
* Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
* Connect like-minded people into a movement.
* Connect people buying with people who are selling.

Connect people and you create value. Did you catch that?

It used to be that if a piece of software costs $500.00, it MUST have value, right? But now FREE software is becoming some of the best software available. Wordpress anyone?

But… but, how can the folks behind Wordpress make money by giving away their product for FREE??? They create value.

And because of that value, because of their ability to organize a collaborative effort to create a powerful tool for free, they’ve been given MILLIONS of dollars to work on other projects.

Back to the right’s inability to collaborate
Now, back to our current state of the right when it comes to building online infrastructure. I can tell you from personal experience that almost every highly skilled tech guy on the right will respond one way when I ask for help with something related to tech… “what’s your budget?”

I’ll tell you what my budget it… ZERO. I’m not an organization. I don’t have donors, and thanks to extremely high taxes, I have very little money. How on earth can I afford $10,000 to have a massive social media community developed?

I can’t.

In fact, the #dontgo Movement is an all volunteer movement. We have no money. Heck… I’m now about $700 out of pocket to get the site you’re reading and the other various projects of #dontgo up and running.

Fortunately for us, there are guys like Allen Fuller of Flat Creek Strategies and Aaron Marks of Three Group, LLC who get this and are helping us in every way they can, but most on the right instantly send me a financial “proposal” when I ask for help.

So the first problem we have is that the people on our side who get and understand the technology and tools, aren’t willing to blend minds in a collaborative effort to help build community style networks and social media tools.

Like I said, it isn’t that we don’t understand the technology of the internet; Rather, it’s that we don’t understand what needs to happen in order to make it truly succeed.

Our second problem, which also involves collaboration, is the pride in taking credit for online success. The elites of the right online are so caught up in getting credit for online political success that they would rather not see success than to see someone else get credit for it.

There is an intense level of “I didn’t think of this so I won’t be working with it” going on in the right. I’m not going to mention names because I’m not writing this to start a fight, but trust me… it’s out there. And it’s a BIG problem.

At some point, we on the right, myself included, have GOT to stop bickering and “competing” with each other. It’s past time we move our pride out of the way and come together with wide open minds and start with a clean slate… a fresh drawing board if you will.

And last, but certainly not least, we need to knock it off with the “messaging is king” junk. No, it isn’t. Messaging is KEY, but in no way is it KING.

The REAL king of online political success that translates in to offline political victory is COMMUNITY.

How many times have we on the right watched a $40,000 website go live, only to fall flat on its face a few months later? The problem is the assumption of community.

In the past we’ve built our web properties on a foundation made of tools and technology. We need to start building our web properties on foundations made of PEOPLE. You know… bloggers, activists, donors, and voters.

People need to be given a say at the very beginning of web projects. We need to be given OWNERSHIP… our own little “I did this part” to take pride in. When people have a personal investment in something, they want to see it succeed.

We need to stop thinking “I need to make my project succeed”, and we need to start thinking “we need to make our project succeed”.

It’s all about community… and it’s all about collaboration. We can talk about the party, the message, the narrative, the tools, the players and the movers all day long, but until we get in to a collaborative/community based frame of mind, we’re not going to win.

That’s my rant for the day…

-Eric Odom

The well-known definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. House Republicans appear to be insane.

When then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) stepped down in 2006, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) was elected to replace him. Boehner went on to lead Republicans with a bland, lame, uninspiring legislative agenda. Voters, led by conservatives who sat on their hands, rewarded him by kicking Republicans out of the majority in November of that year, hoping Republicans would wake up and change their evil ways before the White House was on the line.

They didn’t.

Learning nothing from that Election Day massacre, House Republicans re-elected Boehner as Minority Leader. He - and they, collectively, under his leadership - went on to bore the electorate with an unimaginative legislative agenda in opposition to a Democrat-led Congress under Speaker Nancy Pelosi which was even less popular, if you can believe it, than President Bush himself. Under Boehner’s leadership, Republicans couldn’t even agree to back a moratorium on “earmarks” and ended up backing that larded-up $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

Custer-like, Boehner then went on to lead his troops this week to yet another embarrassing election defeat against the most unpopular Congress in modern polling history. As conservative columnist George Will pointed out this week, Boehner has now lost some 55 seats in two short years.

“These are the worst Republican results in consecutive elections since the Depression-era elections of 1930 and 1932,” Will reminds depressed Republican voters. “If, as seems likely at this writing, in January congressional Republicans have 177 representatives.they will be weaker than at any time since after the 1976 elections, when they were outnumbered in the House 292-143.”

There are two things to take from Will’s point: One, Boehner has really stunk up the court; and two, under Boehner things could still get WORSE.

I’m not saying Boehner is a bad guy or that he’s not necessarily a good conservative. I’m saying that when a coach has back-to-back seasons as rotten as Boehner, the team usually fires the coach.

But not Team GOP.

Indeed, word coming out of Washington this week indicates Republicans are about to commit yet another act of political insanity by electing Boehner once again as House Minority Leader.

But don’t blame all conservatives in the House for this insanity. It appears it may be only ONE conservative responsible for this pending disaster - just like it wasn’t all of George Washington’s officers who sold out to the British.

Recognizing that Boehner, clearly enamored with power, was unwilling to do the right thing and step aside graciously, House conservatives, especially those who belong to the Republican Study Committee (RSC), were planning to run one of their own - highly regarded conservative Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) - for Minority Leader. Among those planning the conservative challenge and participating in the strategy sessions was former RSC Chairman Mike Pence (R-Indiana).

And then Pence sold them out.

According to a source close to the situation in Washington, on Thursday - unbeknownst to House conservatives - it was discovered that Pence had cut a deal to support Boehner for yet another term as Minority Leader in exchange for Boehner backing Pence for the #3 leadership position as Republican Conference Chairman. If true, Pence put his own personal ambition ahead of the best interests of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

If this “deal” was indeed struck and is affirmed in the leadership elections scheduled to take place in a week, House Republicans will not only continue traveling down the now well-worn path of electoral failure, but Pence’s betrayal will divide the GOP ranks even worse than before. So movement grassroots conservatives, if they have any hope of turning their fortunes around in 2010, need to give John Boehner the old “Harriet Miers” treatment.

As you’ll recall, President Bush tried to name his longtime friend and highly under-qualified Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. The conservative movement was furious and rose up in unified opposition, eventually forcing Miers to withdraw from consideration.

Conservatives need to rise up and oppose Boehner’s re-election as the House GOP Minority Leader in the same manner - or forever hold their peace. Let the calls, emails and faxes begin!

Written by: Chuck Muth

This has been such an encouraging week. Out of the wreckage of the Republican Party, so many voices have risen to speak for the need to return to our core principles. From the ashes, a conservative renaissance is leading the way back to the foundation on which Ronald Reagan built the Party during 1964-89.

But naturally, like any movement rooted in truth and hope, it has its nay-sayers. One theme that these nay-sayers echo is the idea that the world has changed so much over the last 20 years that the themes that worked for Ronald Reagan won’t work any more.

Hogwash.

Yes, the world has changed, in some good ways, and in some bad ways. But not in any way that affects long-term fundamentals.

Economic and political freedom, individual responsibility, and finite government are not matters of personal preference. Nor are they matters, as the wealth-spreaders like to claim, of greed, unfairness, or un-neighborliness.

They are principles that work. They foster prosperity, in the full sense of the term.

If this understanding has diminished, if these principles have lost some luster over the last two decades, that’s in no small measure due to the big-government Republicans who gave them lip service while collaborating with liberals in undermining them. And this craven collaboration is part of why the world faces economic trouble.

Republicans can continue to kow-tow to the whiners who want government to kiss away all their boo-boos, to bail them out of the consequences of their own irresponsibility, to regulate life into comfort and fairness.

And they will continue to lose. The dream of life enveloped by state-sponsored cushions is more than just the cop-out of weak and cowardly souls who think everyone else is responsible for taking care of them. It’s a prescription for impoverishment. When government micro-manages peoples’ lives, when it spreads the wealth around, when it overturns the natural justice that rewards virtue and punishes vice, it makes life worse; it dampens the human spirit, and human flourishing diminishes.

When government adheres to its proper, finite mission, the people prosper. A party that leads the way to prosperity is a party that can win.

Ronald Reagan once said, “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.” Those great things are true, and they don’t change.

Brilliantly written by: Leslie Carbone

It’s 1:09 on Saturday morning and I’m drinking coffee… so I figured now is as good a time as ever to weigh in with my thoughts on the state of the Right Online.

A lot of the brains on the right are engaging in some deep conversations regarding our use of the internet to advance free-market ideology. While I agree there is a major gap in our message, and I concur with the idea that we haven’t, to date, used marketing in any coherent manner, I think a lot of us are missing the simplicity involved in succeeding with online activism.

But first, I want to opine on our use of technology. During the past three months I’ve had the opportunity to speak on quite a few panels at conferences and events across the country. In almost every one of the panels I’ve participated in, someone suggests that we’re “behind” when it comes to technology.

Personally, I feel this couldn’t be further from the truth. The idea that we’re behind in technology simply doesn’t fly with me. We have, in my opinion, some of the smartest people out there with regards to knowledge of the internet, the technology available today, and how social media creates the perfect vessel for ideas to spread and flourish.

We have guys like Patrick Ruffini, Micheal Turk, Erick Erickson (and everyone else at RedState), Katie Harbath, Aaron Marks, Ali Akbar, Jess Thomas, Allen Fuller and many more. This group has a full understanding of modern technology, social media, and how the two create the perfect marriage.

No, we’re NOT behind when it comes to technology. Where we ARE behind is community.

A major problem on the right is the apparent assumption of community. We have some brilliant developers and tech gurus who can crank out state of the art web properties that cost a fortune, but they build these sites without a community… AKA… foundation. In the end, tens of thousands of dollars are wasted on sites that sit dormant, with its few visitors being donors who are left feeling ripped off and cheated.

How many times have we heard about a new group looking to be the “MoveOn.org of the right?” Yet, when these big budget projects go live they fall flat on their faces because, well, because they do NOTHING to engage online communities. They launch their sites and say “come promote us”.

Well… Thanks, but no thanks.

The alleged leaders of the conservative movement have got to get off the couch and get their hands dirty. They need to be out in the states meeting face to face with bloggers. They need to be on Twitter, Facebook and other networks actively participating in online communities. They need to develop personal relationships with online activists, and they need to allow these relationships to drive projects… allowing the activists to take ownership of the project as it develops.

I’ve had enough of hearing about “new beta projects that will rival DailyKOS and MoveOn.org.” I don’t want to hear about another “new media organization” launching that is ran by people who wouldn’t know the new media landscape if it walked up and back handed them in the face.

I want organizations, political organizations, politicians, and parties to personally reach out to me as a blogger and get to know me. I want to be listened to and I want to play a part in whatever it is they’re working on. I want to have input, and I want ownership in the part I help build.

And I don’t think I’m alone on this.

We have some great minds like Jon Henke, Justin Hart, Joshua Trevino, Rob Bluey and many others who are currently having a solid debate on message, but the rest of the movement needs to drop everything they’re doing and start thinking about developing a crowd powered, community based movement.

Community is where the success in online activism is, and community is an area where the Right Online has completely missed the boat.

My two…

-Eric Odom

On Friday August 1, 2008, at 11:23 a.m., your Democrat majority in the House of Representatives adjourned the House for five full weeks.

House Republicans believe that Congress should not go on vacation until we take action to lower gas and energy prices for struggling American families.

For the last two months we and our House Republican colleagues have used every tool at our disposal to try and get you and your Democrat majority to vote on legislation to lower gas and energy prices by expanding environmentally sound domestic production of oil and natural gas, improving energy efficiency, and encouraging the development of alternative energy technologies.

Many of the proposals we have asked you and your Democrat majority to allow us to vote on are bipartisan proposals that we believe would enjoy the support of a majority of the Members of the Congress. Yet because you and your Democrat Leadership personally oppose these proposals, you are not allowing them to come up for a vote. This past Sunday, you even told George Stephanopoulos that you will never allow this vote to occur ?.

In protest of you and your Democrat majority not allowing an up or down vote on producing more American energy, we and our House Republican colleagues were prepared to take to the floor on Friday, August 1, 2008, and speak to the nation. Rather than allowing that to happen you and your Democrat majority adjourned the House, turned off the television cameras, shut off the microphones and turned out the lights. Nearly 50 House Republicans remained on the floor of the House in defiance speaking to those citizens gathered in the galleries and to the media.

Today we have again returned to the Capitol to continue speaking to the thousands of Americans from all across our country who are visiting the Capitol. We would have preferred if instead we were joined by our colleagues to have a true debate on this issue that ended in an up or down vote.

We think it is unconscionable that Congress has gone on vacation before we have addressed the high gas prices that are crippling our economy and hurting millions of families. We are asking that you reconvene the House from your five-week vacation and schedule a vote on legislation to increase American energy production. Let us be clear, we are not asking for a guaranteed outcome, just the chance to vote.

Signed by: John Boehner, Republican Leader; Roy Blunt, Republican Whip; Adam Putnam, Republican Conference Chairman; Eric Cantor, Chief Deputy Whip; and Members of the House Republican Conference