Posted by Hugh Hewitt  | 12:32 PM

President Bush invited ten talk hosts into the Oval Office for an hour of conversation today --Glenn Beck, Bill Bennett, Neal Boortz, Scott Hennon, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Janet Parshall and me. This was an off-the-record conversation, and so I won't be quoting the president.

I will say on today's show that I am confident about the course of the war and about the momentum in Iraq, as well of the president's absolute commitment to doing right by the troops and his concern for every lost and wounded soldier and their families. President Bush's command of the details and his broad view of the conflict is reassuring, and among my comments to him was the wish that he found more opportunities to engage in long interviews that would allow the American public to see that grasp and that commitment.

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Posted by Patrick Ruffini  | 1:52 AM

The netroots is reveling in Chicago, and the natural reaction is to ask, “Where’s our YearlyKos?”

http://yearlykosconvention.org/

It’s a good question, but ultimately a short-sighted one from an historical perspective. Go back and re-read the TNR piece on the netroots from May. Especially this part:

https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20070507&s=chait050707

The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.

This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves. “We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party,” write Moulitsas and Armstrong.

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.

http://www.cpac.org/

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. Consider:

The Drudge Report is probably the most popular political Web site, bar none. Matt Drudge sets the tone of MSM coverage. And yet Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs. The site looks the same as it did in 1997 (can’t argue with success, I suppose). There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there, read, refresh, and that’s it.

http://www.drudgereport.com/

At its height, Free Republic was the Daily Kos of the right. In fact, I think the stratospheric, un-blog-like traffic numbers of Kos can only be explained by Kos finally filling the Free Republic void on the Left. Who could forget shenanigans like sabotaging Gore campaign conference calls with toilets flushing in the background, or the cries of “Get out of Cheney’s house!” Freepers were able to move action virtually anywhere in America. If Daily Kos is the angry left, Free Republic was the angry right — and we were hooked.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse 

But Free Republic simply could not succeed in the world of the blogosphere, social media, and Web 2.0. The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible, by posting full-text articles (that eventually got them slapped with high-profile lawsuits from WaPo and the LAT). Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a “vanity” and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by Jim Robinson. Their culture was very anti-blog and anti-original content.

Today, Free Republic increasingly finds itself marginalized. If you support Rudy Giuliani, who still has a decent shot at being our nominee, you’ve probably been purged. Free Republic’s walled garden approach worked in the days before blogs and broadband, but they actively resisted changing with the times. What we now have is a resource with more unique eyeballs than Kos but one that won’t work with others or push the envelope technologically. What a waste. Imagine how the history of the rightroots could have been different if Free Republic wasn’t still stuck in 1996?

http://www.observer.com/2007/free-republic-purge-conservative-web-site-bans-giuliani-supporters

http://www.quantcast.com/traffic-compare.jsp?domain0=freerepublic.com&domain1=dailykos.com&domain2=&domain3=&domain4=

What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions, and to raise money for conservative candidates.

Finally, let’s look at the center-right blogosphere. Its watershed moments were 9/11 and CBS memogate. That’s reflected in our strongest core competencies — warblogging and acting as media watchdogs.

Unfortunately, that poses structural challenges that has starved the center-right of tech-savvy volunteers. Of all the issues to choose to make an impact on, the $400 billion-a-year defense apparatus is probably the most impenetrable. (Personally, I would hope that the Pentagon is not reading the blogs to decide their battleplan.) So on the war, we are pretty much limited to punditry, with the obvious exceptions of the milbloggers in the field.

And the media focus also fits the frame of conservative bloggers as pundits rather than activists. If we act as pseudo-journalists and commentators, it stands to reason that we’d think actually getting involved on a campaign is dirty business.

My co-blogger Hugh Hewitt refers to the “lead pipes” of the left-wing blogosphere that are slowly but surely contaminating the groundwater in the Democratic Party. But if their pipes are dirty, ours are leaky and badly in need of an overhaul. (At least if one wants to do more than just pass along positive information about the war.)

It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.

It seems to me that the numbers are there to do something great around the 2008 elections, and that all we need to do is effectively tap into the conservative blogosphere. I looked at N.Z. Bear’s traffic stats for political blogs with over 20,000 visits a day. And the visitor gap between left and right was lower than I could remember in some time: 1.2 million to 870,000 for the left (half of the left’s total was Kos).

http://truthlaidbear.com/ecotraffic.php

Looking beyond the blogosphere, a place the MSM isn’t as familiar with, and you’ll see that the conservative Web is larger than the liberal Web. Sites like Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and Free Republic have monthly audiences that regularly beat Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, to say nothing of Drudge, which still reigns supreme.

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/ 

So the people are there, just as they’ve always been. My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they haven’t been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.

CALLER:  Well, I understand that and I'm glad.  For instance, you used the word "gauche" awhile back --

RUSH:  Right.

CALLER:  -- and you expect us to know what it means.

RUSH:  I do.  Do you know what it means?

CALLER:  Oh, yes, I do.

RUSH:  See?  I was right.

CALLER:  And it comes from a Latin word, I believe, for "left."

RUSH: (Laughing.)  Nooo.

CALLER: (Laughing.)

RUSH:  No.  Do you know what the word "calumny" or calumnies means?

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  You do or don't?

CALLER:  No, I do.

RUSH:  You do, all right.

CALLER:  Well, yeah, it means commotion.

RUSH:  No. I have a story about it.

CALLER:  Oh, okay.

RUSH:  I was not checking to see if you knew.  There's a story.  Conrad Black was on trial in Chicago for looting his company, Hollinger, and so forth, and he was prosecuted by the office of the US attorney. The US attorney there would be Patrick Fitzgerald, and one of the techniques that the prosecution team used in opening arguments was to share e-mails that Conrad Black had written friends using the word "calumnies." He had a blue-collar jury, and they were trying to illustrate that this guy is so high up in the clouds, he's such an erudite, intellectual snob, that he doesn't even speak real English.

CALLER: Ha-ha!

RUSH:  So they used an e-mail where he discussed calumnies and then got irritated when somebody didn't know what it meant.  My only point here is that there's a lot of resentment for achievement. There's a lot of resentment for people that use the language correctly.  I have always -- from the moment I became someone that others would ask, "How do you succeed in radio?" -- had the first thing I say be: "Learn to read, write, and speak the English language to the best of your ability.  That alone, however you do it, will convey education and intelligence."  This is why so many of us are so concerned about illegal immigrants not being forced to learn the English language.  It's a cultural thing.  We want the best country we can have.  We want the most educated and informed people we can get.  If you continue to baby people and treat 'em like they're idiots, they're going to stay idiots because you're going to get down to their level to make sure they understand things, and you're not going to even care if they understand things.  So I approach this program each and every day with the confidence that everybody here will either: A, know what I'm talking about and understand it. therefore the communication link will occur, or they will be made curious enough to want to know; both of which are win-wins.  If my attitude was, "I'm smarter than you, and I don't care whether you understand what I'm saying. In fact, I want you to stay dumber than I am," then I wouldn't have an audience, and that's one of the myriad things that's happening to the Drive-By Media.

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