Saul Anuzi and Michael Steele two announced candidates running for RNC chairman, both hosted conference calls for bloggers today.
Saul Anuzi is from Michigan, and runs the blog, That's Saul (though it could use some work). He only had a short time as his plan was taking off, but he sounded smart and had a good sense of what could be done. I like the general outlines of his plans, but would want to see a solid commitment to a 50 state internet strategy.
What we need on the right is community managers responsible for communicating with bloggers, nurturing them, and communicating up the chain the best ideas to the candidates and the candidate staffs. To be done right, the community managers have to be able to let the bloggers run free, and not have repercussions for not toeing the party line.
Hmmm - I liked Saul - hard to say how many people were on the line - but he is a strong choice in terms of laying out a vision for the party.
Michael Steele:
He's running because he's sicked and tired of Republicans whining, and running as Democrat-lite. Cites, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan. Speaks of the value of life, hard work, and security, enterprise and entrepreneurship. I think he's probably closer to the vision, with Saul being more of an organizer.
Says the election was a failure of the Republican message. Makes very clear that we had no message in 2006 and 2008. Michael has a lot more fire in his belly than Saul did. He's storming the gates, and making no bones about it.
Questions: 1) He covers the question of race (was asked if his skin color would allow him to critique Obama better than other Republicans: Steele says being an African-American doesn't mean anything, it's that as an American he can critique his president, based on character and issues.
25 minutes or so more of questions. Gateway Pundit asked about a messaging strategy, which was going to be my question, because I keep hearing these guys talk about the wonders of the Internet, but I want to see a lot more actual meat to those strategies before I get excited about it.
The Democrats were good about taking advantage of existing networks, and creating an reverb chamber for information both true and false. The right has these numbers, but we don't have the equivalent of community managers. Every Republican national organization, or at least one, should have an internet team whose job it is to manage regions of the country, working to build lists of bloggers in separate states they can communicate with.
Communicate doesn't mean emails stating the talking points of the day, but rather assistance in marshalling arguments, evidence, links, and attention to local bloggers. It's the internet version of the 50 state strategy, and it's virtue is the resource can be used by all of the national Republican organizations. And I'd be willing to bet it could be self-financed with internet donations.
Which candidate is best prepared to use the Internet to move forward? I think we'll find out from the campaign between the 2.
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