"beyond cutting edge"

...and into realm the imagination? I don't think so. At least not that crew.

They will probably start with a seminar on how to change light bulbs and "where do you plug it in?"

This could be trouble for the Dems. I agree with Steve in that their ideas are as stale as a week-old bagel but their message is not one of only stale, rehashed ideas that didn't work. It's the target audience. It was relativly small and relagated to cable TV and blowhards like lame Limeblahblahblah. They often only reach a small segment of society and had to rely on the MSM to ignore their falsehoods and pitch it to the general population.

When they find that their ideas are going nowhere that's when they begin to spew hate, lies and other forms of dangerous propaganda. Once that hits the web airways in the same manner the left utilized with good success, they'll piound it home repeatedly. We saw it during the last presdential campaign with PALINaroundwithterrorists and,although not quite as bad, with McAce and the rest of the GOP. Say it enough and it becomes fact. Once they "master" the web, there will be massive amounts of fear mongering and lies broadcasted to create a din to drown-out reality. We already know we can't rely on the MSM to sort it out and speak the truth. Too much money is at stake.

I am very weary that their attempt to "Blind the Blogisphere" with horsepuck will work on the often unfocused american public....

That's something I've noticed with my conservative friends. They're completely focused on appearances, on the window-dressing and not what's underneath. It's all superficial to them.

One of my friends was supporting Mitt Romney because he "looked presidential." Then when he started to support Sarah Palin, he didn't care about her experience or lack there of, he liked her because "she's young, gives great speeches and can re-invigorate the party." Whenever I brought up her policies, he didn't understand why it really mattered.

This is why the Republicans are so focused on the Twitter and the Google and Internets, they think their message is fine, it's just the delivery of it that needs some tweaking.

The GOP's problem is that the party is wildly delusional, while it thinks it is visionary.
Due to 9/11, it got away with murder, but the electorate have seen the party for what it is: a tool for its funding fathers, against the will of the founding fathers.

The GOP's agenda and ideology are out of sync with the nation's needs.

And always have been. The GOP's problem is not that people don't know enough about what they stand for, it's that they know it all too well. The key to their electoral strategy and their electoral victories was always that the voters didn't actually get what they were voting for. Well, they do now. Katrina showed 'em. The loss of their job showed 'em. The collapse of our economy showed 'em.

The GOP's big mistake was this: They became obvious. It says something profoundly sad about them that they do not realize this. It's as if the Wizard of Oz didn't even have sense enough to say, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

repubs on technology: as in the joke about how the family got granddad a stationary bike to get a little exercise, in shape, or at least drop a few pounds, improve the cardio-vascular...

hup hup...

the old dude climbs on with straining and groaning, affixes his feet in the pedal straps, grasps the handlebars... looks up at the family, smiles, and says, "okay, start 'er up..."

wheeew

The winger preference for controlled environments like Fox News and talk radio isn't just happenstantial-- they need to filter out large chunks of reality to sustain their views. I think here's a segment of their audience, even now, who just never gets to hear the rest of the story.

I predict that any real opening by the Republicans to wider internet social networks will have unintended consequences-- lots of true believers will be hearing contrary reality-based viewpoints for the first time.

On the other hand, it is pretty easy to communicate all Republican policy positions in 140 characters.

"Cut taxes." See? I have 130 left!

Many of the GOP's policies have been remarkably successful. We have more income disparity than any time since the 1920's. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy are their lowest point since World War II. We have rasided the estate tax thershold by 400%, and lowered the tax on enormouse estates significantly.

What hasn't been as successful is their ability to obfuscate their agenda. The social values distraction and the focus on terrorism just aren't working the way they did 5 or 6 years ago. Too many people see that the GOP's true agenda is not in the interests of the majority of America.

The research team I work on calls step 2 above a FMB (Fucking Magic Box), and there are usually a couple at the start of a new project. If the FMBs aren't replaced with a real architecture pretty quickly it is a leading indicator that the idea probably isn't a good one. Sort of like the Republican Party.

DN

The Republicans have many different theories for why they lost big in 2006 and 2008: (1) The media was biased towards Democrats in general and Obama in particular. (2) Liberals are much better at "playing dirty" than conservatives, who are constrained by their sense of fair play. (3) Democrats are more technologically savvy, and took advantage of modern tools, including twitter, text messaging, Youtube, etc.

I'm not even going to argue with these points, although I'm not convinced that any of them are true. But even if we grant the claim that the Democrats had these advantages, it is delusional to believe that these are the reasons for the decline in the fortunes of the Republican Party, and not their disastrous record for the years in which they were in power. War, financial instability, the embrace of torture, widening of the gap between the richest Americans and everybody else, skyrocketing deficits that benefited nobody but the richest. If a Republican is trying to explain his party's misfortunes without mentioning these sorts of failures of Republican control, then he is hiding his head in the sand.

It is so much easier to blame new technology and find excuses than to look in the mirror and admit that there is no real substance in the party. Until they figure that out they will continue to lose.

The Republican's fundamental problem is their own hypocrisy, which people have finally started to see through the last couple of years.

They say they want smaller and less instrusive government at the same time they are trying to use governmental power to impose their value system on the entire country.

Until they back off on social issues, nobody will take them seriously as the party of smaller government.

The Republican Party, rumor has it, is going to go "beyond cutting edge."

Right. They're going to mount mass bayonet attacks on us---with baby spoons.

They can tweet, facebook, blog all they want. My grandpa is still not going to see any of it, and old white guys in suits will still be the face of the GOP.
It's like they have decided they are going to make Christian rock and Accounting class hip for 2010. It isn't going to happen not matter how hard you try.

Cantor thinks that Obama just sprinkled fairy dust on google and it got him elected. Now he wants some of that same fairy dust to sprinkle on twitter...and magically people will start voting republican.

When will the party learn that change does not mean putting up brighter prettier signs.
"A sow's ear dressed up like a French purse is still just a sow's ear." The same with the pig people who try to talk like men.

The Republicans bigget problem is demographics. Their second biggest problem is they live in the past.

When their never ending hero Ronald Reagan was elected the electorate was 86% white. When Barack Obama was elected it was 68% white and falling. The Southern Strategy has finally come home to roost. They won for decades on wedge issues like affirmative action, "welfare queens", guns and relgion. That time may well have passed. Demographics have turned against them. Now they are quicly becoming a white, Southern party.

A voter born in the late 1970's remembers Reagan from early elementary school and that's it. Yet all you hear at Republican debates or from listeneing to them for five minutes is Reagan. To about half the voters out there Reagan is history and nothing more. He's irrelevant.

When I think about the difference between the two parties and how they utilize the internet, I think of Michelle Bachman. After her diatribe on Chris Matthews the left blogs quickly moved and within a few days her opponent had over a million dollars donated to his campaign. Although it was too late to swing the election, the dems were left with a sizable war chest that could be utilized elsewhere. Methinks the Republicans just don't get it.

Rest assured, when Republicanites master the Twitter and the tubes, they will no longer be relevant. Twitter is already fading. Its member turnover is atronomical and the tubes wait for no one. Always with the tactics, never a strategy.

Sounds like the Republicans are a bunch of Engineers trying to run for political election. They are fascinated by the Gee-Whiz gadgets that will let them get the word out to the faithful, and overlook the point that "the faithful" are declining in number.

They can communicate with the Republican Base in their typical Republican top-down methods all they want and it won't grow the base.

But that top down one-way communication is something that the Republicans have been masters at for at least three decades. Their techniques harken back to the use of direct mail for fundraising, with the many forms of manipulation they have developed to make that work. You know, like fake surveys that allow the true-believers to spout back the party line, and a series of hot-button wedge issues.

The technology isn't going to help them until they stop trying to sell their failed ideology, and none of the current Republican leaders dare even breathe a word like doing that, for fear that Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist will destroy them in the next Primary.

Even then, the technology won't help until they find out that it is not good just for getting the word out, but also for listening to the American people who want them to act for them.

The Republican Party has deep and systemic problems. Its ideas are unpopular, its policies have failed, and its vision for the future is bankrupt. The GOP's agenda and ideology are out of sync with the nation's needs.

You forgot "the people in the party are idiots" and "the 'leaders' [sic] of the party are idiots."

@ Roddy McSorley and Mike Emm -

I think you (and many other folks) underestimate just how much the GOP has scared the living crap out of people by pushing the social agenda as much as they did.

Go back to the '96 convention. Dole lost any (very small) chance he might have had pretty much when he let Buchanan and the rest of the nutters take over prime time.

In 2000, Gore actually won. 2004 was an anomaly because of 9/11 and the war.

But in the meantime, stuff like Terri Schiavo, the Dover PA school board and the general scariness of people like DeLay stuck in people's minds.

Combine that scariness with the sheer demonstrable incompetence of the Bushies and you had the ingredients for a major sea change.

As was shown with Nixon, the 50% of the American electorate more-or-less in the middle is like a supertanker - incredibly slow to change direction. BUT once set on a new course, almost impossible to change back.

Hmmmm, I wonder what happened to Faux News' "Half-hour News Hour" (or whatever it was called), the lame far-right wing Faux News attempt at humor?

Fell flat, didn't it? Fell on deaf ears? Why? Because there's nothing humorous about what the culture of corruption, greed and criminality conservative Republicans have done to our country.

"President Obama is a great communicator. We understand that,"

Well, no. You don't.

Clinton was a "great communicator".
Ronald Reagan was a "great communicator."

Obama thinks.
Obama listens to many points of view.
Obama, with his team, can compile the views into a plan.
Only then,... Obama communicates.

They don't understand yet what they're up against.

IOW, it's the message stupid, not the method in which it's dispensed.