I've gone ahead and posted a transcript of my remarks at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference last week. My focus was on the branding aspect of politics, which fit in nicely with the overall theme of conservative messaging. The text is below the fold, but if you're curious what the average person is taught to think about Republicans, Zoe and Crowder do a bang up job with this video. The only thing they missed was the caricature of all Southerners as fat racist rednecks frothing at the mouth and planning violence. You can read the New York Times today if you'd like some of that.
Read the video, then check out the below the fold for my remarks. They may shock you with their intelligence and lucidity.
Transcribed Remarks at the Capstone Seminar for the CHLC.
I’m a little disappointed, as I was hoping for teleprompters. [Laughter] It was my understanding they tell us what to say. But then, we don’t rank like the President and Vice-President. I guess we have to come up with our thoughts.
Friends and colleagues, I come before you not to praise the Republican Party, but to bury it. [Laughter] I really mean that. In the last two elections, as a grassroots conservative, I feel the Republican Party has been a wasted shadow of the conservative message, and if we do not come to terms with that, there will be no conservative resurgence. We’ve done a poor job of explaining to the voters who we are, what our values are, because the truth is conservative values are American values. Ultimately, what this comes down to is branding.
I can say these things because I’m not a political consultant or a well-connected businessman. I’m just an average guy with a political blog. I watch Midwestern voters talk about why they vote, and I can tell you they vote based on brand and not necessarily on facts. That’s an important distinction. Brands are very important to people. It makes them feel good when they vote for the right causes.
I should tell you that I’ve looked around at the vast Left-wing conspiracy. It’s not vast, and it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a few people that are tightly organized and well-funded and they speak in a loud voice because they are all shouting together. And there’s not enough of them to win control of the House and Senate and Presidency and State Houses; it’s just that they’ve done a better job of speaking to that vast middle of the American public. And in terms of what we’ve done, our message to the American public, it stinks. It’s not great. And the problem that we face is branding.
And so I have to admit here, I have Democratic voters in my family. I have been working very hard to change their minds over the years. But whatever I do, they just mindlessly pull that lever for anybody who says that they care about children or the environment or the elderly. I always hated that argument because, I mean, I love my children, I love grandparents, I love clean air and water. So, if Democrats stand for those things, what does that mean? That means Republicans don’t stand for those. And that’s branding. That’s marketing. People feel good voting for Democrats because they’re voting for the children, despite the facts, despite the logic. And so over the years, especially when I was young, I would come with evidence and lay out logical arguments as to why my values informed who I was going to vote for, and it just didn’t really matter to them, because they just couldn’t get it out of their heads that Democrats are the Party of the little people and Republicans are the Party of the country club. Again, it all comes down to marketing and branding.
Let me tell you the power of that. Coke and Pepsi. Pepsi always beats Coke in blind taste tests. It’s been doing it for decades. And the reason is that Pepsi has a sweeter flavor. When you sit down for a blind taste test, you prefer sweeter flavors. But Coke has almost a hundred years of marketing behind it, and something about it just makes it cool. And so when survey respondents sit in front of a can of Coca-Cola and they take a drink of it, they feel better about themselves. So, Pepsi may taste better in a blind taste test, but Coke makes you feel good.
When my family walks in, if they pull the lever for Democrats, they feel like they’re doing something. It’s kind of like saying “Hey, I voted for the environment and I’m saving the world.” Just because you voted for someone who says they’re for something, doesn’t mean anything. It’s pure branding. And the problem overall is they see it in every part of the culture. Every time they see the front page of the Post Dispatch or they listen to the dulcet tones of NPR or watch a Bravo drama or an ABC sitcom or you go to a concert and have some goofball singer stand up and tell them what they think about George Bush, it reinforces in their mind that they’re good people doing the right thing. We’ve allowed our opponents to define us, and that is the kiss of death in electoral politics.
And so we’ve got to work on our marketing, because I truly believe that we have the right message, and this never made sense to me. My family shares the same values that I do -- hard work, self-reliance, civic virtue, personal responsibility, a belief in God. How is it that we all believe the same things, and yet some of them want to vote for Democrats and others for Republicans? And the answer is it’s that power of the brand. We’ve been fighting the cultural war, but sometimes I don’t think we understand just how important it is. We’re not organized. We have the numbers, but we’re not organized in that fashion.
Now I started by telling you our marketing is terrible. I know that sounds really harsh, saying the Republican Party should be buried. Buried isn’t dead. Seeds are buried in lean times and they germinate and then sprout in their own time because that’s their nature. And so we do have the possibility of coming back. But to do that, we’re going to have to work on our own personal marketing. The question that faces us is do we truly believe in First Principles – do we truly believe our ideas that our ideas are not only right, but necessary for a strong and vibrant America. We can’t afford to wander 40 years in the desert, because at the end there’s not going to be a promised land. We have to do it and we have to do it now.
Social Media is going to be one of the antidotes. Social media works like sunlight. It’s very much like the transparency discussed in last night’s panel. Who are these people who are going to the MAPS website and looking up data? Who are the people that are digging through the addresses and donor information of Chrysler dealerships? These are bloggers and other people who are just interested in coming up with the data. As they do the hard work that not everybody wants to do, (I find it kind of fascinating), we support them and encourage them.
So we’re going to be leading a Social Media panel a little bit later. It’s going to be Dana Loesch and Bill Hennessy and Kristina Rasmussen. Bill and Dana are Tea Party organizers among other things, and in February on a cold winter day on the Arch grounds, they brought 1,500 people -- I counted them all, there were actually 1,500 [Laughter] --, 1,500 to the Arch grounds to complain about the Spending Bill. And a month and a half later, we brought 10,000, I say “we,” but they did, 10,000 people to Keiner Plaza on April 15th as part of a nationwide protest that brought over a million people out and blew away Obama’s Stimulus meetings. Now, there’s not a person in here who wouldn’t love to bring 10,000 people out 21 months before an election to complain about what’s going on in the government. So, they’re going to talk about what they did using Social Media to bring that many people together.
Kristina works at the Illinois Policy Institute and she’s going to talk about how you can use tools like Twitter to create referral networks, to get volunteers going, but also to get free press attention and to make those networks. And I’m going to talk about Social Media marketing. I’m going to try to shred everything that you know about it, because like most things, there is branding involved, and I’m going to tell you how that’s done right. That’s what I do for a living is teach companies how to use Social Media, and most of what we assume we know is wrong.
I’ll tell you this. I know that Barack Obama was supposed to have this amazing Social Media platform. It’s not why he won the election. They didn’t really do that much. Ron Paul and Howard Dean, they did some great things. They raised huge money. These were candidates that didn’t have a name or the press behind them, but they had tons of information. It’s fascinating what they were able to do. But the Obama campaign, first of all, they raised a lot of money, but most of the money came from big donors. It’s just that they said it was smaller donors. We’re just finding that out now. It was being reported the other day. Of course, bloggers knew that a long time ago. But the point was that the best thing that the Obama campaign did was just to get out of the way and make the grassroots feel relevant. Their best decision was to harness energy, not create it. That’s what they did right.
The problem, of course, is that the Left, the netroots or the nutroots, as we like to call them, they’re a little insane, and so they say crazy things. You know, if it’s not a conspiracy about Sarah Palin, it’s about how somehow Bush is both slow-witted and also the greatest criminal mastermind of our generation. [Laughter] You know, they have some Utopian fantasy about how if you just talk nice to people in the world, everything will be wonderful. We’re told the US, “It’s the largest Muslim nation,” and no one in the press says anything. It’s crazy, the things that have been going on. But they are kind of nuts. And I’m sure there are a lot of you out there, especially ones who aren’t familiar with the Internet, who think that the Right has some fringe, too. Yes, we do have some kooks out there, but there are tons of good Center Right blogs that are intelligent, that are well-written, that are readable by the public, and they support the same things that you do. It’s conservative values. It’s basically “Read the Constitution. Live up to those values.” All we’re asking is that you don’t lie, cheat, and steal, and that you fight for our liberties and protect us from intrusive government. And if you can reach out to these folks, they’re already on your side. And it is a conservative value. You’ve got to figure, if you can’t trust the people in your district, who can you trust?
So, the question for Social Media Theory, what does it mean? What is the goal of it? Well, the goal is to organize people, yes. The goal is to take content and push it out. The goal is to raise funds. It’s to get free press. The goal is not technology. Social Media is just friends sharing information. “Social” is friends, “Media” is information. It’s just friends sharing information. It’s no different than everything that we’ve done for years sitting around dinner tables and churches and softball leagues. It’s just talking to each other about what’s going on in the world. It’s just now taking place online. And a lot of the times we forget that, and we think it’s this magical Social Media. It’s just people talking.
And the best analogy is it’s a dinner party. It’s a neighborhood dinner party. That’s what Social Media is. It’s an intimate affair, 12 people in your neighborhood, you’re a politician and you’ve been invited. You walk up to the door, the hostess comes up, and you immediately ask her to write a check for a campaign contribution. Then you wander in to everybody else at the party and start asking them to sign up for your email list and if they can get their friends to ask for money. Pretty soon nobody wants to talk to you for pretty obvious reasons. This is how politicians approach the online world.
Imagine instead, if you went in and you told the hostess that she looks nice and you ask people where their kids go to school and what they do for a living, and you make friends with people in the right setting, the right expectations. At the end of the night, they know you’re a politician - three people will come up and say, “How can I help?” That’s what you want to do with the Social Media world. Think, which strategy works and which one are you using? That’s really the purpose of Social Media...I seem to have gone way past my notes. I’m tell you, I need six teleprompters. [Laughter] So you start out by asking people their name.
Okay. I’ve got to tell you, Social Media is so important right now, because the day of reckoning has come. It’s amazing what they’re able to accomplish with the Left, how much money they poured into it. They’re pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Colorado races at the city council and mayoral level to prevent conservative candidates from ever becoming rising stars. There are thousands of Left-wing journalists that are just lapping up data that’s created by Far Left Soros-funded think tanks. It’s not even a conspiracy theory. It’s out in the open. It’s called the Journolist, and it’s an echo chamber where Left-Wing bloggers tell Left-Wing reporters what to write, and they tried to hide it from the rest of us but those stories become the mainstream.
This is going on out there, and it happens in Missouri. A year and a half ago the Show-Me Policy Institute did a study about charter schools and posted the information, and the Post Dispatch reported the figures. FiredUp!, which is the Carnahan family’s petblog, wrote “How dare they post this information from a Right-Wing think tank.” And the Post Dispatch apologized. From now on, they make sure they add Right-Wing think tank to the story. I’m pretty sure that Governor Blunt would have been pretty happy to be able to call up a reporter and tell him they need to apologize for daring to publish information. But it’s not going to happen this side of eternity. So, I mean, you know, the problem with the media is this activity, but we face a bigger problem. It’s possible that next year at this time, there’s a good chance that the Post Dispatch won’t be a print edition. That is a reality, folks. [Applause] It’s a problem, because at least now we know how to work it sometimes. What’s going to step into that vacuum? How are we going to reach out to those people who don’t read blogs or forums and speak to them? If we haven’t created an alternative – we need to create one, anyway, to rally around the damage of the mainstream media. And we’ve done that to some extent on talk radio and certainly grassroots, but what have we done to aggregate that information across the country? We haven’t done the job that we need to, because if there’s no Post Dispatch, where are people going to get their information?
The Left is ready. They’ve organized and those journalists will roll into administrative positions. I think two-thirds of the media is now working for Obama unofficially or is that officially? The numbers are all messed up, but they’re ready for this. They’re ready for what happens if print goes away. And it’s even possible, the paper could be done under a government subsidy, which if possible could be even more biased towards conservatives. So, the question is “What do we actually do about it?” We have all these, I mean, I’m hear just wonderful things on the panel. You guys are all doing the right kinds of things. The question is how do we aggregate that data. What are we doing to help each other?
The story behind Social Media, when I’m sitting there working with a small business, is that there are a trillion web pages out there, so what makes someone read yours? And so what we do in the business world is if we get ten or twelve that don’t compete against each other, but talk about the same topics. Maybe it’s being a small business, maybe it’s being in St. Louis, or maybe it’s a real estate agent and a lawyer. You know, different people to pass referrals around to each other. And the advantage of it is they talk together and they form communities online, and they are louder shouting together than they are as an individual voice.
And so the promise of Social Media is this: All the things that you guys are doing, we could push that content online, but it only becomes relevant when we’re talking to each other and promoting each other. And so if you are a member of a group that is trying to get some attention online, trying to get a foothold, the best thing that you could do is talk to four or five other people at this conference and promise to work together. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Illinois or Wisconsin or if you’re all in the same state. You promote other people’s groups and you’ll all be louder if you do so. Politicians, the same thing, if you promote other politicians and you do social networking, folks, you know how this works. This is no different than everything we’ve always done, but we have to learn to do that online. And so there are some strategic and tactical things that we’ll talk about for blogs and social networks and getting into videos and such. But there are some things that you have to remember. If you are running a campaign or getting involved in issues, if you start six weeks before the election, it’s too late. The time for Social Media is right now. You need to build these networks and make friends with local bloggers, Mom bloggers, God bloggers, political bloggers in your district that share the same values that you do. You need to make friends with them now and reach out to them now so that you have the network in place when you start running.
The second thing that you have to do is make sure that you’re tracking data. People, they want to get involved. So, go to people who were at the Tea Parties and give them tasks. You know, go track Russ Carnahan, go track Emanuel Cleaver, go track Lacy Clay, go take a look at Robin Carnahan and see what she’s saying. If people actually listened to what most politicians said in office, they would never elect them. But I don’t have to tell you these things. I mean, when was the last time Robin Carnahan took any position, on anything? Well, at some point she’s going to slip up, especially now that they’re all excited about Social Media. You know, what we’ve got to learn to do is take those and turn them into the campaign and share that with people. We need to organize those groups and make sure we get a really – you get 200 people, that should be all over the press and all over the Web. So we’re going to talk about that on the panel.
I guess Social Media is kind of like the pre-soak cycle on your washing machine for politics. [Laughter] You have to prepare the battleground. Get the message out. The message is this: We have conservative values that matter. We follow them. We truly believe in First Principles. The fact is that they’re necessary for a strong and vibrant America, and people believe that. If my family shares those values, if we can break the idea of branding, we can do this with a people’s media. I mean, everyone up here is supposed to be some crazy Right-Winger, but if you sit and talk to them, they make a lot of sense. So if all you’re getting is what the Left is putting out in the media, you could never meet the true people talking about believing in conservative values. The question is how do you find people, how do you celebrate and promote them. And long before the campaign starts, before the legislation is introduced, you build that network so that when the time comes, you can utilize them. That’s the promise of Social Media. That’s what I hope we will cover in the rest of the panel. So, thank you. [Applause]
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