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All this talk about method (better social media) and message ("stop talking
about your feelings on rape") and they aren't addressing the underlying
problem: their incredibly unpopular policies. One might say it's like
putting lipstick on a pig.


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 9:24 AM, <tedkaufman@comcast.net> wrote:

> On the chance that you missed last sunday's excellent magazine article on
> GOP media by Robert Draper - here it is.
>
> (in addition for those who want a blow by blow on the republicans and the
> 112th congress read draper's book - "do not ask what good we do")
>
>
>
> www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/can-the-republicans-be-saved-from-obsolescence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&pagewanted=print
> ****
>
> February 14, 2013****
>
> *Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?*
>
> *By ROBERT DRAPER*
>
> One afternoon last month, I paid a visit to two young Republicans named
> Bret Jacobson and Ian Spencer, who work in a small office in Arlington,
> Va., situated above an antique store and adjacent to a Japanese auto shop.
> Their five-man company, Red Edge, is a digital-advocacy group for
> conservative causes, and their days are typically spent designing software
> applications for groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Republican
> Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lately, however,
> Jacobson and Spencer have taken up evangelizing — and the sermon, delivered
> day after day to fellow conservatives in the form of a 61-point
> presentation, is a pitiless we-told-you-so elucidation of the ways in which
> Democrats have overwhelmed Republicans with their technological superiority.
> ****
>
> They walked me through a series of slides showing the wide discrepancies
> between the two campaigns. “And just to make them feel really bad,”
> Jacobson said as he punched another image onto the overhead screen. “We
> say, ‘Just wait — this is the most important slide.’ And this is what kills
> them, because conservatives always look at young voters like the hot girl
> they could never date.” He read aloud from the text: “1.25 million more
> young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.”****
>
> In the light of his Apple monitor, Jacobson’s grin took on a Luciferian
> glow. He is 33, wiry and well dressed and has the twitchy manner of a
> highly caffeinated techie. “And then we continue with the cavalcade of
> pain,” he said. The next chart showed that while the Romney campaign raised
> slightly more money from its online ads than it spent on them, Obama’s team
> more than doubled the return on its online-ad investment.****
>
> Spencer chimed in: “That’s when one of our clients moaned, ‘It’s even
> worse than I thought.’ ” Spencer, who is 29, possesses the insectlike eyes
> of a committed programmer. He and Jacobson are alumni of the University of
> Oregon, where they both worked on the Commentator, a conservative
> alternative paper whose slogan was, “Free Minds, Free Markets, Free Booze.”
> ****
>
> “Then, once people think we’ve gotten them through the worst,” Jacobson
> said, “we pile on more — just the way Obama did.” He put up Slide 26,
> titled, “Running Up the Score.” “Obama was the very first candidate to
> appear on Reddit. We ask our clients, ‘Do you know what Reddit is?’ And
> only one of them did. Then we show them this photo of Obama hugging his
> wife with the caption ‘Four more years’ — an image no conservative likes.
> And we tell them, ‘Because of the way the Obama campaign used things like
> Reddit, that photo is the single-most popular image ever seen on Twitter or
> Facebook.’ Just to make sure there’s plenty of salt in the wound.”****
>
> Back in August 2011, Jacobson wrote an op-ed in Forbes alerting
> Republicans to Obama’s lead on the digital front. His warnings were
> disregarded. Then last summer, he and Spencer approached the conservative
> super PAC American Crossroads with their digital-tool-building strategies
> and, they say, were politely ignored. It’s understandable, then, that a
> touch of schadenfreude is evident when Jacobson and Spencer receive the
> policy-group gurus and trade-association lobbyists who file into Red
> Edges’s office to receive a comeuppance.****
>
> “Business is booming for us,” Jacobson said. “We’ll double or triple our
> bottom line this year, easily. But this isn’t about getting new business.
> We need the entire right side of the aisle to get smart fast. And the only
> way they can do that is to appreciate how big the chasm was.”****
>
> Exhibit A is the performance of the Romney brain trust, which has suffered
> an unusually vigorous postelection thrashing for badly losing a winnable
> race. Criticism begins with the candidate — a self-described data-driven
> chief executive who put his trust in alarmingly off-the-mark internal polls
> and apparently did not think to ask his subordinates why, for example, they
> were operating on the assumption that fewer black voters would turn out for
> Obama than in 2008. Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be
> remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put
> it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never
> tweeted.” (“It was raised many times with him,” a senior Romney official
> told me, “and he was very categorical about not wanting to and not thinking
> it was worth it.”)****
>
> Under the stewardship of Zac Moffatt, whose firm, Targeted Victory,
> commandeered the 2012 digital operations of the Romney campaign, American
> Crossroads and the Republican National Committee, Team Romney managed to
> connect with 12 million Facebook friends, triple that of Obama’s operation
> in 2008; but Obama in 2012 accrued 33 million friends and deployed them as
> online ambassadors who in turn contacted their Facebook friends, thereby
> demonstrably increasing the campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts in a way
> that dwarfed the Republicans’. While Romney’s much-hyped get-out-the-vote
> digital tool, Orca, famously crashed on Election Day, Obama’s digital team
> unveiled Narwhal, a state-of-the-art data platform that gave every member
> of the campaign instant access to continuously updated information on
> voters, volunteer availability and phone-bank activity. And despite
> spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the Romney television-ad-making
> apparatus proved to be no match for the Obama operation, which enlisted
> Rentrak, the data corporation for satellite and cable companies, through
> which it accrued an entirely new layer of information about each and every
> consumer, giving the campaign the ability to customize cable TV ads.****
>
> “They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member
> of the campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide
> shortly after the election. Later, the top aide would participate in a
> postelection forum with Obama’s campaign manager. He told me (albeit, like
> a few people I spoke to, under the condition that he not be identified
> criticizing his party), “I remember thinking, when Jim Messina was going
> over the specifics of how they broke down and targeted the electorate: ‘I
> can’t play this game. I have to play a different game, so that I don’t look
> like an idiot in front of all these people.’ ”****
>
> But the problem for the G.O.P. extends well beyond its flawed candidate
> and his flawed operation. The unnerving truth, which the Red Edge team and
> other younger conservatives worry that their leaders have yet to
> appreciate, is that the Republican Party’s technological deficiencies
> barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of
> the last six presidential elections. The party brand — which is to say, its
> message and its messengers — has become practically abhorrent to emerging
> demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an
> entire generation of young voters. As one of the party’s most highly
> respected strategists told me: “It ought to concern people that the most
> Republican part of the electorate under Ronald Reagan were
> 18-to-29-year-olds. And today, people I know who are under 40 are
> embarrassed to say they’re Republicans. They’re embarrassed! They get
> harassed for it, the same way we used to give liberals a hard time.”****
>
> *It was not long* after the election that elder statesmen of the G.O.P.
> began offering assurances that all would soon be right. But younger
> Republicans were not buying it. On Dec. 6, Moffatt addressed an audience of
> party digital specialists at the R.N.C.’s Capitol Hill Club. Moffatt spoke
> confidently about how, among other things, the Romney digital team had
> pretty much all the same tools the Obama campaign possessed. Bret Jacobson
> was shocked when he read about Moffatt’s claim the next day. “That’s like
> saying, ‘This Potemkin village will bring us all prosperity!’ ” Jacobson
> told me. “There’s something to be said for putting on a happy face — except
> when it makes you sound like Baghdad Bob.”****
>
> A few days after the Moffatt gathering, the R.N.C.’s chairman, Reince
> Priebus, announced that the committee would conduct a wide-ranging
> investigation — called the Growth and Opportunity Project — into the ways
> the party was going astray. To guide the investigation were familiar names,
> like the former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, the
> longtime Florida operative Sally Bradshaw and the R.N.C. veteran Henry
> Barbour. Erik Telford, the 28-year-old founder of the RightOnline bloggers’
> convention, told me that he found himself wondering aloud: “Do you want an
> aggressive investigation from people who’ve built their careers on asking
> skeptical questions? Or do you want a report from people who are
> symptomatic of what’s gone wrong?”****
>
> Equally galling to younger Republicans was the op-ed Stuart Stevens wrote
> in The Washington Post on Nov. 28. In it, Romney’s top strategist struck an
> unrepentant tone, proudly noting that the candidate “carried the majority
> of middle-class voters” and that the party therefore “must be doing
> something right.” From her office near the Capitol, Kristen Soltis
> Anderson, a 28-year-old G.O.P. pollster, tried not to come unglued. “But
> you didn’t win the election,” she told me she thought at the time. “I’m
> really glad you scored that touchdown in the third quarter, I am — but you
> lost the game!”****
>
> Anderson is a fantasy-football fanatic, with the rat-a-tat argumentative
> cadence that gives her away as a former high-school debater. Upon
> graduating from college, she became the lead singer of the Frustrations, a
> rock-ska group that folded, as only a D.C.-based band could, when one
> member decided to attend law school and another needed more time to study
> for the bar exam. Anderson, for her part, is now a pollster and vice
> president of the Winston Group. Like the Red Edge partners and virtually
> every other young Republican with whom I spoke, she regards herself as a
> socially tolerant, limited-government fiscal conservative. (Today
> Republicans of all age groups strenuously avoid describing themselves as
> “moderate,” a term that the far right has made radioactive.) Camera-ready
> and compulsively perky — she has twice appeared on Bill Maher’s ”Real Time”
> panel as a token conservative — she nonetheless lapses into despondency
> when talking about her party’s current state of denial. During one of the
> postelection panels, Anderson heard a journalist talk about his interviews
> with Romney staff members who had hoped to build a winning coalition of
> white voters. “That just stunned me,” she told me one afternoon over
> coffee. “I thought: Did you not see the census? Because there was one! And
> it had some pretty big news — like that America’s biggest growing
> population is the Latino community! Surprise, surprise! How have we not
> grasped that this is going to be really important?”****
>
> One afternoon last month, I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch
> her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single,
> middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who
> were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted
> for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were
> sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson
> deemed them within reach of the Republicans. Each group sat around a large
> conference table with the pollster, while I viewed the proceedings from
> behind a panel of one-way glass.****
>
> The all-female focus group began with a sobering assessment of the Obama
> economy. All of the women spoke gloomily about the prospect of paying off
> student loans, about what they believed to be Social Security’s likely
> insolvency and about their children’s schooling. A few of them bitterly
> opined that the Democrats care little about the working class but lavish
> the poor with federal aid. “You get more off welfare than you would at a
> minimum-wage job,” observed one of them. Another added, “And if you have a
> kid, you’re set up for life!”****
>
> About an hour into the session, Anderson walked up to a whiteboard and
> took out a magic marker. “I’m going to write down a word, and you guys
> free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she
> wrote was “Democrat.”****
>
> “Young people,” one woman called out.****
>
> “Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill
> Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More
> science-based.”****
>
> When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and
> vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.”
> “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.”
> “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their
> ways.” “Farmers.”****
>
> Anderson concluded the group on a somewhat beseeching note. “Let’s talk
> about Republicans,” she said. “What if anything could they do to earn your
> vote?”****
>
> A self-identified anti-abortion, “very conservative” 27-year-old Obama
> voter named Gretchen replied: “Don’t be so right wing! You know, on
> abortion, they’re so out there. That all-or-nothing type of thing, that’s
> the way Romney came across. And you know, come up with ways to compromise.”
> ****
>
> “What would be the sign to you that the Republican Party is moving in the
> right direction?” Anderson asked them.****
>
> “Maybe actually pass something?” suggested a 28-year-old schoolteacher
> named Courtney, who also identified herself as conservative.****
>
> The session with the young men was equally jarring. None of them expressed
> great enthusiasm for Obama. But their depiction of Republicans was even
> more lacerating than the women’s had been. “Racist,” “out of touch” and
> “hateful” made the list — “and put ‘1950s’ on there too!” one called out.*
> ***
>
> Showing a reverence for understatement, Anderson said: “A lot of those
> words you used to describe Republicans are negative. What could they say or
> do to make you feel more positive about the Republican Party?”****
>
> “Be more pro-science,” said a 22-year-old moderate named Jack. “Embrace
> technology and change.”****
>
> “Stick to your strong suit,” advised Nick, a 23-year-old African-American.
> “Clearly social issues aren’t your strong suit. Stop trying to fight the
> battle that’s already been fought and trying to bring back a movement. Get
> over it — you lost.”****
>
> Later that evening at a hotel bar, Anderson pored over her notes. She
> seemed morbidly entranced, like a homicide detective gazing into a pool of
> freshly spilled blood. In the previous few days, the pollster interviewed
> Latino voters in San Diego and young entrepreneurs in Orlando. The findings
> were virtually unanimous. No one could understand the G.O.P.’s hot-blooded
> opposition to gay marriage or its perceived affinity for invading foreign
> countries. Every group believed that the first place to cut spending was
> the defense budget. During the whiteboard drill, every focus group
> described Democrats as “open-minded” and Republicans as “rigid.”****
>
> “There is a brand,” the 28-year-old pollster concluded of her party with
> clinical finality. “And it’s that we’re not in the 21st century.”****
>
> *Of course,* many conservatives like their brand just the way it is,
> regardless of what century it seems to belong to. Anderson did not relish a
> tug of war over the party’s identity between them and more open-minded
> Republicans. She talked to me about Jon Huntsman, the presidential
> candidate whose positions on climate change and social issues she admired,
> and the unseemly spectacle of his denigrating the far right. To prosper,
> the party should not have to eat its own, she maintained. Still, to hear
> her focus-group subjects tell it, the voice of today’s G.O.P. is repellent
> to young voters. Can that voice, belonging to the party’s most fevered
> members, still be accommodated even as young Republicans seek to bring
> their party into the modern era?****
>
> This conundrum has been a frequent postelection topic as youthful
> conservative dissidents huddle in taverns and homes and — among friends, in
> the manner of early-20th-century Bolsheviks — proceed to speak the
> unspeakable about the ruling elite. I sat in on one such gathering on a
> Saturday evening in early February — convened at a Russian bar in Midtown
> Manhattan, over Baltika beers. The group of a half-dozen or so conservative
> pundits and consultants calls itself Proximus, which is Latin for “next,”
> and they seem to revel in their internal disagreements. One of them argued,
> “Not all regulation is bad,” while another countered, “I hate all
> regulations, every single one of them” — including, he cheerfully admitted,
> minimum-wage and child-labor laws. Nonetheless, the focal point of
> Proximus’s mission is not policy formulation but salesmanship: how to bring
> new voters into the fold while remaining true to conservative principles.*
> ***
>
> “This is a long-term play,” conceded John Goodwin, a founder of the group
> and former chief of staff to the outspoken conservative congressman Raúl
> Labrador. “This isn’t going to happen by 2014. But we want to be able to
> show voters that we have a diversity of opinion. Right now, Republicans
> have such a small number of vocal messengers. What we want to do is add
> more microphones and eventually drown out the others.”****
>
> “And we can’t be afraid to call out Rush Limbaugh,” said Goodwin’s
> fiancée, S. E. Cupp, a New York Daily News columnist and a co-host of ”The
> Cycle” on MSNBC. “If we can get three Republicans on three different
> networks saying, ‘What Rush Limbaugh said is crazy and stupid and
> dangerous,’ maybe that’ll give other Republicans cover” to denounce the
> talk-show host as well.****
>
> Cupp, who is 33, defines her brand of conservatism as “rational — and
> optimistic!” She is staunchly anti-abortion but also pro-gay-marriage and a
> “warheads on foreheads” hawk whose heroes are Barry Goldwater and William
> F. Buckley Jr. Like many Republicans today — and indeed like liberal
> Democrats in the 1980s, before Bill Clinton came along and charted a more
> centrist course — Cupp finds herself in the unenviable position of
> maintaining that Americans largely side with her party’s worldview, even if
> their votes suggest otherwise. “Public polling still puts the country
> center-right on a host of issues,” she told me.****
>
> The problem is that her party’s loudest voices sound far more right than
> center. The voters in Kristen Soltis Anderson’s focus groups condemned
> Republicans for their unchecked hatred of Obama and for threatening to take
> away financing for Planned Parenthood, ban abortion, outlaw gay marriage
> and wage war. From where they stood, at the center-right of S. E. Cupp’s
> domain, the party had been dragged well out of plain view.****
>
> Proximus seeks to marginalize the more strident talking heads by offering
> itself up to — or if necessary, forcing itself upon — the party as a
> 21st-century mouthpiece. “If I were training a candidate who’s against gay
> marriage,” Cupp told me, “I’d say: ‘Don’t change your beliefs, just say
> legislatively this is not a priority, and I’m not going to take away
> someone’s right. And if abortion or gay marriage is your No. 1 issue, I’m
> not your guy.’ ”****
>
> I tried to imagine how Cupp’s kinder-gentler message-coaching would go
> over with the Tea Party, a group that was never mentioned by the young
> Republicans I spoke with until I broached it. Still, the influence of the
> far right on the party’s image remains hard to ignore. When I brought up
> the subject of the Tea Party to Cupp, she said: “People aren’t repelled by
> the idea of limited government or balancing the budget or lowering taxes.
> Those Tea Party principles are incredibly popular with the public, even if
> they don’t know it. Again, that’s a messaging issue, that’s not a principle
> issue.”****
>
> She went on to say, “I don’t think we win by subtraction” — meaning, by
> casting out the party’s right wing to entice the centrists. Instead, Cupp
> and her fellow travelers hope to revive Lee Atwater’s bygone “big tent,”
> under which gay people and Tea Party members and isolationists and neocons
> would coexist without rancor. But Atwater, the legendary R.N.C. chairman,
> did not have to worry about freelance voices like Limbaugh and Todd Akin
> offending whole swaths of emerging demographic groups. Nor during the
> Atwater era, when Ronald Reagan was president, did the party’s most extreme
> wing intimidate other Republicans into legislating like extremists
> themselves, thereby further tarnishing the party’s image. When I mentioned
> this to the Proximus gathering, Goodwin explained the dilemma faced by
> Republicans in Congress. “What forces them to vote that way, 9 times out of
> 10, is a fear of a primary challenge,” he said. “What we hope to accomplish
> is to bring more voters into Republican primaries, so that it isn’t just
> the far right that shows up at the polls.”****
>
> The dilemma, Goodwin acknowledged, is that the far-right rhetoric may well
> repel such voters from participating in G.O.P. primaries to begin with. “We
> recognize that this isn’t something that’s going to happen anytime soon,”
> he said.****
>
> *On Nov. 30,* more than 2,000 progressives shuffled into the Washington
> Convention Center to participate in RootsCamp, an annual series of seminars
> hosted by the New Organizing Institute, where the most cutting-edge digital
> and grass-roots organizing techniques are discussed. The shaggy and the
> achingly earnest are well represented at RootsCamp, which makes it an easy
> target of derision from the right. A reporter from the conservative
> publication The Daily Caller attended the postelection gathering in 2010
> and made great sport of the “unconference,” with its self-conscious
> inclusiveness, which the reporter termed “multilingual, multicultural and
> multi-unpurposeful.”****
>
> But the handful of conservatives who attended the conference this past
> November were in no mood to sneer. One was Patrick Ruffini, a 34-year-old
> leader of the G.O.P.’s young-and-restless digerati. At RootsCamp, his
> breathless tweets of the sessions held by top Obama organizers — “In eight
> years, calling people will be obsolete”; “Digital organizing director and
> field director will be one and the same” — set off a buzz among Republican
> techies. Ruffini was plainly impressed by the openness of the experience.
> “I’m like, Wow, they’re doing this in front of 2,000 people, and the system
> seems to actually work,” he told me a month later. “The thing I was struck
> by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem
> has embraced the free market — whereas the Republican one sort of runs on
> socialism, with the R.N.C. being the overlord.”****
>
> The success of the RootsCamp, and its smaller and more intensive offshoot
> gathering, the New Media Boot Camp, helps explain the yawning digital
> divide between the two parties. In 2006, a few holdovers from the Howard
> Dean and John Kerry campaigns eschewed lucrative offers from Washington
> consulting firms in order to devote some of their time to the communal
> information-sharing ideals of the New Organizing Institute. Since then,
> numerous Boot Camp alumni have gone on to help run the tech operations of
> the Obama campaign and throughout the Democratic Party infrastructure,
> while RootsCamp has served as a crash course in best practices for
> thousands of lefties.****
>
> Young Republicans now lament that no one from their side has stepped up to
> organize a conservative version of RootsCamp. Michael Turk, a 42-year-old
> Republican digital guru, suggested that the failure of G.O.P. technologists
> to do this springs from a uniquely Republican trait. “They all wanted to
> make money,” he said. “And so as a result, Katie Harbath, who was one of my
> deputies at the R.N.C., is now at Facebook, and Mindy Finn” — a longtime
> G.O.P. digital operative — “is at Twitter, and Patrick and I each started
> our own companies. We all found ways to parlay that into a living for our
> families, as opposed to just doing it for the cause.”****
>
> Several G.O.P. digital specialists told me that, in addition, they found
> it difficult to recruit talent because of the values espoused by the party.
> “I know a lot of people who do technology for a living,” Turk said. “And
> almost universally, there’s a libertarian streak that runs through them —
> information should be free, do your own thing and leave me alone, that sort
> of mind-set. That’s very much what the Internet is. And almost to a person
> that I’ve talked to, they say, ‘Yeah, I would probably vote for
> Republicans, but I can’t get past the gay-marriage ban, the abortion
> stance, all of these social causes.’ Almost universally, they see a future
> where you have more options, not less. So questions about whether you can
> be married to the person you want to be married to just flies in the face
> of the future. They don’t want to be part of an organization that puts them
> squarely on the wrong side of history.”****
>
> Many young conservatives also said that technological innovation runs at
> cross-purposes with the party’s corporate rigidity. “There’s a feeling that
> Republican politics are more hierarchical than in the Democratic Party,”
> Ben Domenech, a 31-year-old blogger and research fellow at the libertarian
> Heartland Institute, told me. “There are always elders at the top who say,
> ‘That’s not important.’ And that’s where the left has beaten us, by giving
> smart people the space and trusting them to have success. It’s a
> fundamentally anti-entrepreneurial model we’ve embraced.”****
>
> Erik Telford explained it this way: “I think there’s a very incestuous
> community of consultants who profit off certain tactics, and that creates
> bias and inhibits innovation.” Telford was suggesting that many of the
> party leaders, like Karl Rove and his American Crossroads super PAC, saw no
> financial advantage to bringing in avant-garde digital specialists, the
> types who were embraced by the Obama operation. For that matter, Zac
> Moffatt and his firm, Targeted Victory, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the
> G.O.P.’s digital business during the lackluster 2012 cycle, which has made
> Moffatt an irresistible symbol for all that’s clubby and backward-thinking
> about the party. As Bret Jacobson said, half-jokingly, “If you have one
> firm that’s doing the top candidate, plus the R.N.C., plus the top outside
> group — the Department of Justice, in any other industry, would be actively
> asking questions.”****
>
> One of several G.O.P. digital whizzes who went unused by Moffatt’s shop in
> 2012 was Vincent Harris, a savvy 24-year-old social-media consultant whose
> efforts in Texas helped catapult Ted Cruz to an upset victory over a
> better-known candidate in the U.S. Senate primary. Harris told me he saw
> the Romney campaign as “a very insular, closed operation,” symptomatic of a
> partywide affliction. “There’s an old guard in Republican politics, and
> that old guard is mostly made up of television and direct-mail
> consultants,” he said. “And you can say that’s generational — but at the
> same time, David Axelrod has to be the same age as Karl Rove, right? The
> old guard in the Democratic Party made the adjustment with the Obama
> digital operation. There hasn’t been a concerted effort among the
> established G.O.P. folks to figure this stuff out.”****
>
> Harris suffers no illusions that the Roves of his party will turn over the
> keys to young techies like him. “We’re the second rung,” he told me. “The
> first tier isn’t going away for another 20 years.”****
>
> *It is Harris’s last* *point* *— *that the G.O.P. is stuck with its
> current leadership for the next decade or more — that incites particular
> angst in young Republicans. With palpable envy, they describe the
> forward-leaning impulses of the Obama campaign: Axelrod’s tweeting
> endlessly; the deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter’s becoming a
> YouTube dynamo with her sassy Web rebuttals to the Romney campaign; Jim
> Messina’s traveling westward to receive wisdom from Eric Schmidt, Steve
> Jobs and Steven Spielberg. (From Spielberg, about not trying to replicate
> their 2008 campaign: “You can only be the Rolling Stones from 1965 once.
> And then you’re a touring band that has to sell tickets each time you come
> to town.”) One leading G.O.P. digital operative told me: “We’re looking for
> someone who comes to us and is like: ‘All right, what do we need to do? I’m
> going to trust you to do it, I’m going to give you a real budget, you’ll
> have a seat at the table and will be just as important as the
> communications guy and the field guy. And you know what, those other guys
> need to be more modern, too, and that’s the campaign we’re going to run. So
> let’s start plotting out how we’re going to do that.’ ”****
>
> Echoing the opinion of nearly every other young Republican with whom I
> spoke, the operative concluded sadly, “And we haven’t had that person yet.”
> ****
>
> The person they are seeking is the Republican incarnation of David Plouffe
> — the seemingly unremarkable Hill staffer and itinerant consultant who,
> like the Howard Dean strategist Joe Trippi before him, recognized that the
> only way his relatively unknown and underfinanced candidate could prevail
> over the front-runner would be to muster a guerrilla operation. To
> accomplish this, in 2007, Plouffe met with a 25-year-old former Dean techie
> named Joe Rospars and promptly enlisted him to help marshal candidate
> Obama’s volunteer support through high-tech means. Plouffe, Rospars told
> me, became the champion of “using digital to build the campaign from the
> bottom up.” Employing then-nascent social media channels like Facebook,
> YouTube and Twitter, Rospars’s team raised enormous sums of money online
> while also plugging a nationwide grass-roots network into Obama’s
> get-out-the-vote efforts. Four years later, Stephanie Cutter said, “Plouffe
> was a big proponent” of completely reimagining the 2008 effort.****
>
> A few days before this year’s inauguration — after which he would take
> leave of the Obama White House and of politics as a profession — Plouffe
> met with me in his small and uncluttered West Wing office. He wore a blue
> shirt and a purple tie and, with his work now done, was
> uncharacteristically expansive. He told me he was surprised by the Romney
> campaign’s strategic shortcomings. After naming one particular member of
> Romney’s high command, he said, “We had 15 people more qualified to do that
> job than him.”****
>
> Plouffe cut his teeth as the deputy chief of staff of Representative Dick
> Gephardt, whose impressive farm team also included those who would go on to
> be White House advisers, like Paul Begala, George Stephanopoulos and Bill
> Burton. Now it was the Obama operation that, he said, “is going to generate
> a lot of people who are going to run presidential and Senate campaigns.”
> They were apt pupils of a campaign that was “a perfect-storm marriage
> between grass-roots energy and digital technology.” He continued: “Not
> having that is like Nixon not shaving before his first debate — you’ve got
> to understand the world you’re competing in. Our thinking always was, We
> don’t want people when they interact with the Obama campaign to have it be
> a deficient experience compared to how they shop or how they get their
> news. People don’t say, ‘Well, you’re a political campaign, so I expect you
> to be slower and less interesting.’ Right? We wanted it to be like Amazon.
> And I still don’t think the Republicans are there.”****
>
> But, I asked Plouffe, wasn’t the G.O.P. just one postmodern presidential
> candidate — say, a Senator Marco Rubio — away from getting back into the
> game?****
>
> Pouncing, he replied: “Let me tell you something. The Hispanic voters in
> Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico don’t give a damn about Marco Rubio, the
> Tea Party Cuban-American from Florida. You know what? We won the Cuban
> vote! And it’s because younger Cubans are behaving differently than their
> parents. It’s probably my favorite stat of the whole campaign. So this
> notion that Marco Rubio is going to heal their problems — it’s not even
> sophomoric; it’s juvenile! And by the way: the bigger problem they’ve got
> with Latinos isn’t immigration. It’s their economic policies and health
> care. The group that supported the president’s health care bill the most?
> Latinos.”****
>
> Plouffe readily conceded that he and his generation held no iron grip on
> political wisdom, but then he flashed a grin when I brought up the R.N.C.’s
> Growth and Opportunity Project, composed of party stalwarts. “If there’s a
> review board the Democrats put together in 2032, or even 2020, and I’m on
> it,” he said, “we’re screwed.”****
>
> The Republicans did in fact recently have a David Plouffe of their own. As
> one G.O.P. techie elegantly put it, “We were the smart ones, back in ’04,
> eons ago.” Referring to the campaign that re-elected George W. Bush,
> Plouffe told me: “You know how in fantasy baseball you imagine putting up
> your team against the 1927 Yankees? We would’ve liked to have faced off
> against the 2004 Republicans. Beating the Clintons” — during the 2008
> primaries — “that was, in terms of scale of difficulty, significantly above
> beating Romney. But going up against the Bushies — that would’ve been
> something we all would’ve relished.”****
>
> Plouffe wasn’t referring to competing against Bush’s oft-described
> architect, Karl Rove — but rather, against the campaign manager, Ken
> Mehlman. “Mehlman got technology and organization and the truth is — I
> think it’s completely misunderstood — it was Ken’s campaign,” Plouffe said.
> He added that he and Mehlman were friends, and that during the 2012 cycle,
> Mehlman — who had been informally advising the Romney campaign — was also
> “very free with advice about structure, how they dealt with an incumbent
> president, how they dealt with debate prep.” (Similarly, the former Bush
> senior strategist Matthew Dowd told me that Axelrod reached out to him for
> advice and they sat down together. “Which never happened with me and
> Romney-world.”)****
>
> Mehlman, according to Bush campaign officials, persuaded Rove to invest
> heavily in microtargeting (a data-driven means of identifying and reaching
> select groups of voters), which helped deliver Ohio and thus the election.
> He advocated reaching out to minority voters both as Bush’s campaign
> manager and later as chairman of the R.N.C., where he also instructed his
> staff to read “Moneyball.” “I was like, ‘What does a baseball book have to
> do with politics?’ ” said Michael Turk, who worked for Mehlman at the
> R.N.C. “Once I actually took the time to digest it, I realized what he was
> trying to do — which was exactly the kind of thing that the Obama team just
> did: understanding that not every election is about home runs but instead
> getting a whole bunch of singles together that eventually add up to a win.”
> ****
>
> I met with Mehlman one morning in his office near the Capitol. He left
> politics in 2007 and subsequently came out as gay — and after that, became
> a vigorous if behind-the-scenes supporter of legalizing same-sex marriage
> in New York and beyond. Mehlman is now a partner at the private-equity
> giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, wealthy and free from his party’s fetters.
> He was nonetheless hesitant to criticize his fellow Republicans, though
> implicitly his comments were damning.****
>
> “There’s an important book by Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon called
> ‘The Real Majority,’ published in 1970,” Mehlman said as he leaned back in
> his chair. “The book explains in part how the Republican Party would go on
> to win five out of six presidential elections through the eyes of the
> ‘typical’ voter — a working-class couple in Dayton, Ohio. They’re white,
> worried about crime, feel burdened by taxes and feel like too many
> Democrats don’t understand these concerns.”****
>
> Today’s typical voter, he went on to say, could be that same white couple
> in Dayton. “But here’s the difference,” he said. ‘They worry about economic
> mobility — can their kids get ahead or even keep up. Their next-door
> neighbors are Latino whose mom gets concerned when she hears talk about
> self-deportation or no driver’s licenses. And that couple has a gay niece
> and an African-American brother-in-law. And too many folks like the couple
> in Dayton today wonder if some of the G.O.P. understands their lives
> anymore.”****
>
> I asked him whether, as even some Republicans have suggested, Ronald
> Reagan would have trouble building a winning coalition today. “I think he
> could win, partly because Reagan wouldn’t be the Reagan he was in 1980,”
> Mehlman replied. “Reagan had an unbelievable intuitive understanding of the
> electorate, because he’d spent his life as the president of a large union,
> as an actor who understands his audience, as the governor of the largest
> state, as a corporate spokesman who traveled — Reagan spent his life
> listening to people and learning from them and adapting to their concerns.
> That’s why there were Reagan Democrats — ethnics, working-class voters,
> Southern voters. So I think a modern Reagan would understand the demography
> and where the new voters are and would’ve applied his principles
> accordingly.”****
>
> But could a modern-day Reagan, even with Ken Mehlman running his campaign,
> overcome the party’s angry and antiquated image? To win, a reincarnated
> Reagan — or a Rubio or a Chris Christie or a Bobby Jindal — would still
> have to satisfy his base of hard-line conservatives and captivate a new
> generation of voters at the same time. I ran this quandary by Kristen
> Soltis Anderson. “It’s a big challenge,” she acknowledged. “But I think
> that if you can earn the trust of the people, there are ways you can say,
> ‘Here’s why I take this position.’ I don’t know that someone like Rubio,
> who may be young and attractive and well spoken, could attract young voters
> despite his views on gay marriage. I do think that in the absence of a very
> compelling reason to vote for a candidate, those social issues can be
> deal-breakers for young voters. The challenge is: Can you make a case
> that’s so compelling that you can overcome those deal-breaker issues? And I
> don’t know the answer to that question.”****
>
> Bret Jacobson, the Red Edge entrepreneur, insisted that the solution was
> ultimately a simple one. “I think the answer for a vibrant Republican Party
> is to make our North Star empowering every individual in this country to
> follow their own dream, free of legislative excesses,” he told me. “There
> are millions of Americans who take seriously their religious culture as
> well as traditions that have been handed down for centuries. And the party
> has to empower them to fight those battles in the social sphere, not in the
> government sphere. That’s harder work than taking control of the country
> for four years. But it’s the appropriate battle.”****
>
> But, I asked him, don’t social conservatives feel a moral obligation to
> legislate their beliefs? Did Jacobson really expect the Rick Santorums of
> his party to let a new generation of Republican leaders tell them what to
> accept and how to behave?****
>
> Jacobson did not back down. “Even the Republican Party rejected Santorum,”
> he said. “He got some attention, and he certainly received votes. But he
> didn’t win.”****
>
> In a sense, however, Santorum and his fellow archconservatives did win, by
> tugging Mitt Romney and his pliable views rightward. Then Romney lost, and
> so did the Republicans.****
>
> *Two days after* Obama’s inauguration, Bret Jacobson flew to Charlotte to
> attend the R.N.C.’s winter conference and sit on a panel devoted to
> discussing new digital techniques. “Bret’s presentation was one of the
> best-received of the panel, by far,” the seminar’s organizer, Ryan Cassin,
> told me. Still, Jacobson was disappointed to see only 30 people in
> attendance. President Obama, meanwhile, announced the previous week that
> his campaign juggernaut would be transformed into an advocacy group,
> Organizing for Action, that would use the vast social network amassed
> during the 2012 cycle to advance the administration’s policy goals. The
> Republican panel amounted to a first step — a baby step — while the
> competition was lapping them.****
>
> Jacobson did not stick around the next day to hear Reince Priebus declare
> to the conferees, “We’re the party of innovation!” Instead, he left his own
> panel early to catch a plane back to Washington. Calls were continuing to
> come into Red Edge’s office from establishment Republicans inquiring about
> Jacobson and Spencer’s cautionary slide presentation.****
>
> Jacobson wanted to interpret this interest as a good thing. But I could
> tell from his voice that the experience at the R.N.C. conference deflated
> his hopes about Republicans being well on the road to enlightenment. “My
> primary worry,” he told me without his characteristic levity, “is that I’m
> going to become the Al Gore of the right” — meaning, a forecaster of doom,
> appreciated and unheeded as the clever if somewhat lonely guy who told them
> so.****
>
> *Robert Draper* <robertldraper@gmail.com>* is a contributing writer for
> the magazine. His most recent book is “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside
> the U.S. House of Representatives.”*
>
> ** **
>
>


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Alexander Snyder Mackler
(302) 598-867