“#dontgo is officially a movement,” announces Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini.
And, no, that’s not a typo. #dontgo is a Twitter-based effort by conservatives to force a vote on new oil drilling during the House’s August recess. Ruffini describes his aim:
MoveOn is mobilizing against the House Republicans and the rightosphere this afternoon. I don’t think they’ve ever done this in response to a grassroots conservative protest. Something has changed.
There has been nothing worthwhile to speak of in recent years that’s emanated solely from the base like this has. It’s worth our time to take a step back and understand what made this success possible.
First, while Reps. Mike Pence and Tom Price provided the spark by starting the House floor revolt, it was the rightosphere (and crucially, the Twitterverse) that poured the gasoline.
Elected officials cannot start movements on their own. They need a willing audience to activate. The audience was primed by John Culberson leading the revolt against the ridiculous House franking rules. (On the issue side, it was primed by Newt’s “Drill Now” movement.) That solidified Culberson, and by extension minority Republicans, as the troublemakers storming the gates with technology, and Democrats as the lame defenders of an old order. That is the natural role of any political minority, but one House Republicans, accustomed to the majority, have been uncomfortable embracing. Until now.
“A movement it is not,” responds the liberal blogger Karoli at Bang the Drum.
Beginning this afternoon, their site was answered with tweets carrying the hashtag #dontgo coming from the ‘other side’ and feeding into their twitter stream page, at least, until they shut it off and swore they would accept no spam.
What was an effective use of the swarm has become outright silly, with the new user DontGoMovement created to pick and choose which flow of conversation reaches their website. I’m guessing dissent isn’t part of their “movement”. Between the raised rhetoric, the silliness of shutting down conversation, claiming it’s a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right’, and the fundamental dishonesty of the Drill Here Drill Now premise that spawned the whole thing, they are on the verge of becoming laughingstocks.
Listen, this should be about light, not heat. Not everything in politics has to be escalated to a nuclear meltdown. Laughing about proper tire inflation is characteristic of a campaign that’s gone off the rails. While I have a lot of respect for what Ruffini has tried to do to advance his cause, I deeply resent the corresponding ridicule and stupidity that accompanies it.
Matt Stoller at OpenLeft takes issue with Ruffini’s characterization of his movement as “grassroots.” “The problem with this formulation is that the people that I spoke from MoveOn came because they were volunteers, whereas the people from the pro-drilling groups were paid staffers from groups like the National Taxpayers Union and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks,” he writes.”I spent some time arguing with a nice young man from FreedomWorks about oil companies (though I’ll spare you the video), and he was a law student who did economic policy for the group. These two groups are by and large funded by large companies, and they were formed by recognized conservative movement elites who came to power in the 1980s. In fact, the entire drill drill drill campaign originated with Newt Gingrich, hardly the kind of leadership you’d expect from a real grassroots uprising.”
Meanwhile, Ruffini’s colleague Kristen Soltis thinks Republicans are out in front on microblogging:
The Twitterers among us (myself included) are giddy like Chris Matthews at an Obama rally, thrilled that technology was able to give word of the revolution to the masses. Members of Congress connected directly with “followers”. Drudge made it his top headline. The whole affair has been given the tag “#dontgo” on Twitter, drawing on the way in which conferences and major events get referenced using the micro-blogging site. For us political junkies who have watched too much West Wing, the idea of a Congress gone rogue in defense of the American people is too romantic, too fantastic not to spend the weekend gabbing about.
So, then, the question arises — to what extent is “#dontgo” actually going to move voters? If Congressional Republicans do something exciting and important but nobody really knows about it, does it matter? (If a tree falls in a forest, and all that jazz.)
My answer is an emphatic “yes”.
So, folks, which is it: politics as usual, or a revolution in 140 characters or less?
From 1 to 25 of 35 Comments
How can any of this possibly matter to real people who do real work in the real world?
— Randall WilliamsIt’s in the same vein as McCain saying ‘that’s not change we can believe in.’ Little more than an attempt by people with little creativity and intelligence to pull on the middle by co-opting (almost plagiarizing) the creative and intelligent message that’s successfully drawn the middle toward the other side.
— Brian NiemeyerThe Paul Revere of this revolution was FreeRepublic.com. It was a Freeper calling congressional offices Friday morning who got word from their staffers about the revolt and posted it to Free Republic. From there it exploded across the conservative blogosphere.
The Congressmen using Twitter from the floor, once it was noticed, gave a great revolutionary feel to the protest as Speaker Pelosi tried to shut down media coverage in the House by turning off the cameras, the lights, the mics and by trying to get the press gallery shut down.
Patrick Ruffini obviously wasn’t around during the impeachment of President Clinton. MoveOn was founded to oppose the House Republicans’ impeachment efforts and to counter the online efforts of conservatives at sites like Free Republic (which pioneered online political activism, BTW)Matt Stoller takes issue with staffers from issues groups participating in the counter-protest of MoveOn (Freepers were there, of course). I wonder if he’s ever complained about the liberal groups like NOW, SEIU, ACORN, CODEPINK, etc. who routinely fill their protests with paid staffers and interns. People get involved with issue groups because they care about the issues. Getting out in public and protesting is part of getting your message out.
Conservatives have gotten a bad rap about using the Internet. Our successes are ignored in the mainstream media and run down by political consultants who profit from pitching their services.
It was Free Republic that first picked up the Obama Landstuhl troop snub from Der Spiegel and helped make that an issue.
Grassroots conservatives used the Internet in combination with talk radio to defeat amnesty for illegal aliens three years in a row.
The #DontGo campaign is a good idea, but it will be just a part of what has become a grassroots rebellion.
Websites with mass popularity like the Drudge Report, Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Hot Air (to name but a few) will still be the most effective means for getting important Twitter messages out to conservatives at large.
— Kristinn TaylorPolitics as usual. Oil company lobbyists using blogs does not equate to a grassroots movement.
— SarahWow, these juys should have “PROPERTY OF BIG OIL” tattooed on their foreheads. Republicans get more pathetic every year.
— danA revolution? – only if they get Paris. In a bathingsuit. Com’on Repubs, don’t be so serious, get the blonde. Okay, let’s get serious, I think it’s interesting that none of these Repubs could get their fearless leader, W., the Oil Industry’s number one spokesman, to call a Special Session of Congress (he can you know) before he went off to “sorta” tell China to stop with their human abuse regime while watching the Olympics. Where is the President’s priorities?!
— ciceroIt doesn’t look like anything new to me. Just more pressure tactics from a familiar special interest group–oil companies that know that if they get to drill oil offshore, they can sell that oil to anyone in the world and Americans may never see a drop of it.
— marik71. The so-called “Landstuhl troop snub”, referred to above, is a false issue. It’s just a lie, amplified in the Republican echo chamber. Right-wing bloggers and the McCain campaign are just trying to distract people from the fact that they don’t have anything positive to offer by petulantly questioning Obama’s patriotism. Maverick indeed.
2. Even the US Energy Information Agency believes that the impact on gas prices of lifting the offshore drilling ban would be insignificant, and that insignificant reduction in price wouldn’t be felt until around 2017. It’s just more Stone Age thinking by the Republicans, who are firmly in the pocket of Big Oil. The 21st century solution to the increasing scarcity of oil is to use something else to generate all that energy. If we keep living in the past, we won’t have a future.
— James FosterCan’t honestly say I see anything new here. We should never forget that the histories are written by the winners. In this case, if things keep on as they are, the losers (poor, uneducated, etc.) won’t even be able to read the history. We need a change alright. We need to get a large enough majority in charge and committed to serving ALL the people – not just those rich enough to contribute to a political campaign.
— Chris ColestockEnjoy the fireworks as the republican party implodes. A bunch of rich old white guys leading the grassroots campain against those oppressive poor people who cannot fill up their gas tanks, pay the mortgage, and buy food all a the same time. Yeah, we’re all crying a river over how badly oil companies that are being bullied the american taxpayers.
— givemeabreakPulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind reveals Bush ordered CIA to forge evidence of Iraqi WMD and Al Qaeda connections before the invasion, far stronger grounds for impeachment than Watergate, the NYT completely ignores the story in the print edition, and the above GOP juvenile grandstanding nonsense is what you waste your time on? Imbecility must be contagious in this era.
— Josh NossiterIf the Corporate Greed Merchants buy the movement it isn’t one. The old white guy Rightwing is just wrong. Don’t they ‘get-it’, they need to look around, everything their privately owned Neocon pinhead Whitehouse has been involved in for the last 7+ years is a frigg’n disaster. Drilling for a 5 minute supply of oil we won’t see for ten years while even the Oil Comapnys’ haven’t drilled most of the leases they already hold is beyond lame & clueless. No wonder the republicans are about to suffer the worst defeat in decades, they have yet to look at the mess they created, and they still want to talk about Bill Clinton’s lack of moral fibre. Most americans, as they will learn on election day, would trade in George W. Bush for Bill Clinton in a heartbeat, Monica, Blue Dress and all !
— Ed BurkeThe risk of spoiling the beautiful sparkling white sands of Florida is not worth the few barrels of supposed relief several years from now. More oil is not an answer,let us pull up our selves by the proveral boot straps and get our inter city electric trolleies and busses huming… Get people to riding on trains between cities similar to the Japanese. Drill, drill drill is not facing the hard truths of our time.
— Bob Bergstrom SRWe need leadership, not more fairey tales from big oil..
When the biggest oil man in Taxas says we can’t drill our way out of this–who in their right mind would even listen to the likes of Kristinn Taylor?
Evidently a bunch of people–but why??
— Ken WI have nothing interesting to say about this because I don’t understand it at all. It’s apparently written in a secret code.
— dreevesxA true conservative would conserve our resources (higher average fuel efficiency for cars and trucks), conserve our beaches (no offshore drilling), conserve our planet (work to reduce greenhouse gasses), conserve our constitution (outlaw warrantless eavesdropping), and so on. The Republicans are hardly true conservatives, rather they dance to the beat of big corporations and some religious zealots who are more concerned with homosexuals than poverty. Exactly when did offshore drilling become a conservative value?
— arimiloI wonder if this is important enough for McCain’s aides to open Firefox for him.
— Ben AThe rebels? More like circus clowns, ranting and raving about getting off-shore opened up again. As everyone should know, this won’t make any difference for a long time. Check out the PickensPlan.com and even the oil man says it won’t make a difference. If we want real leadership, and a chance at saving this place, and having some place left for our children’s children, we better make some painful decisions, rather than being so fatalistic and trying to live it up all the time.
The Right can Twitter as much as they want, but we know that they are just trying to distract everyone from making the hard, unconventional decisions that might make all of us sweat a little bit. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH does not make a grassroots movement.
— Robert from WisconsinIf there is a whole lot of oil out there to drill then why is Exxon sending its profits back to the shareholders by buying back stock?
Companies in growth industries retain earnings for investment. Companies who can’t grow give the shareholders cash to invest somewhere else.
Surprising that the people who are always talking about “economics” haven’t figured this one out. Maybe because they avoided all the Econ courses with algebra and other hard stuff?
— Wonks AnonymousTwitter is a total waste of time.
— Jess#######
“#dontgo is officially a movement,”
announces Republican
blogger Patrick Ruffini.
Too bad, McCain wouldn’t
know a twitter from a titter.
No, to answer the above
question about republicon
blogging. It doesn’t
matter because few of
the real base have
computers or know
what a blog is.
#######
— McBushIs the McCain campaign out to prove that:
“If it twitters, it just might be old?”
Should we wonder why those who “Twitter” are called “Twitterers” rather than just “twits?”
Maybe, instead of just trading witty insults, we should we be praising the (current) lack of substance abuse in the McCain camp, since there clearly isn’t any substance in sight in his campaign…
But if things start to look dim for the Republicans in the audience, remember, if things start to look dim, you’ll always have Paris (who is, incidentally, way hotter than McCain).
— Ivan PtizelovI know that this isn’t necessarily the point of this article, but I feel the need to point out the screamingly obvious hypocrisy of Republican “grass roots activists” whose only proposed solution to the current gas-pump pain is to push for something (offshore oil, which most of them had never even heard of until a few weeks ago) that won’t affect prices for another decade – while they simultaneously mock Obama’s reminder to inflate out tires – which, of course, would lead to the twin real-world, real-time effects of increasing mileage and reducing prices (through reduced demand).
Yep, this sure looks like hypocrisy – until you realize that keeping our tires inflated properly is not a money-maker for any corporate interest. Offshore drilling, on the other hand, most certainly is. So, on one hand, you have Obama offering great advice that will actually help people get more miles per gallon while also reducing prices via reduced demand, and yet he’s being mocked as the next Cardigan Carter. The Republicans, on the other hand, offer up a plan that A) won’t have any effect on prices for a decade, B) will even then only change prices by between 10-15 cents per gallon, and C) doesn’t do anything to help anyone in the here and now – except, of course, for the oil companies. And yet they somehow are able to take up the bloody shirt of raging populism, while Obama constantly fights the “elitist” label.
It’s like the world is perpetually upside down when it comes to US politics.
— JDMr. Williams: your “how can any of this matter” is a lot like Doris Lessing’s disdain for blogging as being unrelated to literature. In fact, blogging is becoming literature, Internet video is becoming the news, and viral messaging is becoming politics. The whole world of communications is gradually reshaping itself, and the people who will be left behind are the people who insist that the new platforms don’t matter.
— panterazeroInteresting that McCain is ranting and raving against the Do Nothing Congress for going on vacation without addressing the energy issue. What is his present job title? Oh yeah…
— Opsimath44