Behind the movement that shocked the liberals

Guardian:

Erik Telford remembers all too vividly the dark cloud hanging over him on 5 November 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. For the internet strategist at the rightwing campaign group Americans for Prosperity, election night was a double disaster. Not only had Obama won the votes, he had outwitted his Republican opponents in his use of new media tricks such as email recruiting and social networking.

"The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary," Telford says.

That cloud hung over the conservative movement for many weeks. A sense of crisis set in, he recalls, with bloggers, strategists and Republican politicians scrambling in different directions.

"There was a real lack of leadership, a lot of confusion."

But then, almost imperceptibly, something started to happen. Telford noticed Google groups popping up, listserves on which people would send angry emails back and forth. The anger was stimulated by Obama's $800bn stimulus package that was introduced five days into his presidency.

With very little leadership, the Google groups began to co-ordinate their response. People took on the onerous job of poring over the bill's hundreds of pages of small print in search of wasteful spending, following the Wikipedia model of crowd-sourcing.

They began to uncover items that looked suspicious or ridiculous: electric golf carts, snow machines, a crime museum in Las Vegas. They passed the examples on to mainstream media outlets, notably the new face of the right, snake-tongued Glenn Beck of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, who used it as ammunition to attack the young administration. The anger grew. When Americans for Prosperity put up its own petition against the bill on its website, it had 500,000 signatures within days.

"It was a huge wake-up call to all of us," Telford says. "On the right, people had known new media was important but they were still hesitant about it. After the stimulus experience, no one was left in any doubt about its power."

Less than eight months later, the seed planted in those anti-Obama Google groups has burst into flower on the streets of Washington. Tens – or even perhaps hundreds – of thousands of livid demonstrators filled the capital, brandishing banners saying "Don't tread on me!" and "Obamunism" – a reference to the president's perceived socialist or even communist tendencies. "Liar! Liar!"they shouted, echoing the outburst of a Republican congressman to Obama's face last week.

The noise of that startling crowd could be heard rumbling on throughout this week. Democrats rushed to dismiss the display of rightwing force as the work of mavericks and extremists. Jimmy Carter upped the ante by suggesting the vitriol was racist: many people in America, he said, believed a black man should not be president.

For Telford, though, dismissing the eruption as extremist or racist was to miss the point. For him, the 9/12 rally marked the moment at which conservative America finally embraced the new world and recovered its confidence. He believes the movement is now close to catching up with the Democrats in terms of internet savviness; in some ways he contends it has even surpassed them, particularly on Twitter, where much of the heavy lifting behind the so-called "tea parties" against Obama's tax and other policies is being done.

Matt Kibbe, who heads FreedomWorks, a national conservative group that led the push behind last Saturday's rally, goes further. He says that the movement has stolen from Obama the techniques he used to such effect last year and is now redeploying them as a stick with which to beat the president.

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There is much more. It is worth reading in full. The Texas director of AFP is Peggy Venable who has been working with bloggers for some time. She has also had a high energy presence in moving the Texas legislature in the "right" direction. I met Telford at a bloggers conference as well as some of his staff. They have been active in organizing a response to the liberals that has clearly thrown them off their stride.

Hopefully they will help us achieve a renaissance of conservatism in this country. Until then, we must all continue to fight the evils of liberalism where ever we see it.