The opportunity for conservative bloggers

The Hill:

Conservative groups are not celebrating the election of Barack Obama, with perhaps one exception: right-wing bloggers, who see a ripe opportunity to catch up with the left.

A Washington in the hands of Democrats offers online pundits on the right a fresh political target and a chance to vent against their ideological opponents. The reverse scenario allowed their liberal counterparts to blossom during the blogosphere’s infancy, when the GOP controlled the Congress and the Bush administration held power between 2003 and 2006.

But the aptly named “rightosphere,” much like its liberal counterpart, “the netroots,” doesn’t simply want to criticize the other team. It sees this as its time to reshape the Republican Party.

“The rightosphere will be much better when the right has something to oppose,” said Jon Henke, who writes at The Next Right.

Obama and Democrats will eventually provide conservatives with a “unifying grievance” that they can seize on. On the Democratic agenda could be universal healthcare proposals that would expand government programs, union-backed card-check legislation that would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections when unionizing, and calls to reverse momentum to expand offshore drilling, Henke said.

Being in the opposition is also a natural posture for conservatives, who want smaller government but have seen GOP lawmakers in the last few years create more federal programs, expand the deficit and spend greater sums of taxpayer dollars.

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One concrete way conservative bloggers hope to increase their influence is by forcing party leaders to embrace new technologies. Rebuild the Party, a coalition of bloggers and top Republican Web strategists, aims to press the Republican Party to make the Internet its top priority for the next four years.

Conservatives best known for blogging make up the group, including Erick Erickson, managing editor of RedState.com, and others who have worked in the field, such as Patrick Ruffini, President Bush’s 2004 campaign Web master, and Mindy Finn, the director of online strategies for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R) 2008 White House bid.

The group is specifically calling for the party to get the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of 5 million activists into its online database, raise at least $100,000 online for candidates in each of the GOP’s targeted House races in 2010, and field credible candidates in all 435 congressional districts.

The bloggers also hope to influence the selection of the next Republican National Committee chairman. The group is not working for any particular candidate yet, but Finn said it could get involved as next month’s vote on the chairman approaches.

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But before Republicans get to where they want to go, they could suffer from post-election infighting. Bloggers have attacked old-school conservative pundits, including newspaper columnists Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, for dismissing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as unprepared for the vice presidency.

In one instance, Matt Lewis, a blogger at Townhall.com and a Rebuild the Party member, wrote that Palin’s conservative critics cost Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) votes. In another, Erickson wrote that the party should oppose any GOP candidates with staffers who had leaked damaging information about Palin, such as the thousands of dollars she spent on clothes.

Still, the infighting is almost certain to be overshadowed by a common opponent: the Democratic-controlled government.

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The most important thing that conservative bloggers can do is point out the failures of liberalism and Democrat leadership. The voters in the middle are not as ideological as bloggers on the right or the left, but they are interested in whether government is working. That means that corruption is a big issue that works against the party in power. It means creating perceptions of failure.

The Democrats won the 2006 and 2008 elections by creating the false perception that we were losing the war in Iraq and that Republicans were responsible for the Demcorats' debacle after Katrina. As to the latter the voters closest to the problem knew the problems eminated from a dysfunctional Democrat governor and they voted the Democrats out. The point is Republicans won because of the correct perception that the Democrats were failures.

Our job as bloggers is to reinforce the the perceptions of Democrat failure. We should have been able to do that in 2008 because of the Democrat incompetance in leading Congress. Instead we were being to stoic for the most part in absorbing blows they were throwing our way. We did make some progress on the energy issue, but then let them off the hook after September. We should have also been hammering the Democrats for being wrong about Iraq.

Another advantage we have going into the next election is that Demcorats are going to have to take responsibility for Congressional spending.

I am sure that Democrats will have many other failures that will provide opportunities for conservatives to hammer them.