sarah palin fights the future

The trouble with being the movement that "stands athwart history yelling 'stop'" is that you risk being left behind when history has moved on without you, anyway.

If Sarah Palin thinks that Andrew Sullivan and Ben Smith or any other of the web's essential political commentators are "bloggers in their parents' basement", as she told Greta van Susteren on Monday, then it's time to presume that she can be safely crossed off of any list of serious 2012 presidential candidates. The challenge before the RNC is that they have to recognize this as well.

The Obama campaign proved decisively something that Howard Dean and Ron Paul's campaigns had gone a long way towards suggesting: the internet is an indispensable part of any campaign ground game from this election forward.

In some ways, following Palin into 2012 is the path of least resistance for the Republican party at this point. Palin will have universal name recognition, and it is undeniable that she is an electrifying figure for a significant proportion of conservatives. But she is not the candidate of the future. Behind Obama, Democrats have shown that they have a deep understanding of the power of the web as a fundraising and communications tool. A presidential candidate four years hence - when more newspapers have become online-only concerns and internet access will be that much closer to ubiquity - cannot fail to understand the importance of the web.

Comments

[MikeM]

I heard Sudhir Venkatesh at Siena last night. In the Q&A, he mentioned that he believes the Obama win will mark the dawn on the eternal-campaign age. All you people who are getting Obama texts, don't expect them to stop. Expect campaigning for policy to be not unlike campaigning for office. Gov. 2.0.

[Fernando Rizo]

I'm not 100% sold on that. Obama's Twitter account (not that it was ever well-employed) has been notoriously silent since election night.

This isn't me being a sycophant either, either - I think the Obama people are pragmatists who realize two things:
1) Twittering with individual citizens isn't "presidential"
and
2) Good governance is the best campaigning a sitting president can do.

It's a good point, though, and it'll be interesting to look at all of the new transparent government initiatives through this lens.

I read "Gang Leader for a Day" this year, incidentally. I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't read the relevant chapter from Freakonomics, which covers most of the good bits.