Even though there are fundamentalists who take conservativism to the extreme, I don't think tea baggers represent the average American conservative voter.

A lot of people concerned about the deficit right now simply haven't had the opportunity to learn the hard economic evidence that proves deficit spending in a recession is the right thing for the government to do. We need to reach out to these people in ways that are effective.

I don't think the correct response is demagoguery because of the misspelled or incoherent signs posted on flickr. One has to actually talk to the opposition in person to be able to effectively understand the dynamic on the ground right now.

I've been to 10 or 11 health care reform rallies in Colorado since this summer that have each ranged in size from 1,500 to the hundreds of people. We have gotten only marginal coverage in both the local and national media, even for the largest rallies. That sucks. When you take the time out of your schedule to show up for something like a rally, you want to believe that it matters that you're really doing something.

There's no more fulfilling confirmation of your involvement than to be covered in the news, especially prominently so, if that ever even happens. Because most of the time you don't get covered at all and it sucks.

But do you ever suspect that Drudge would put on blast grassroots progressive action? Expecially in the 72 hours leading up to an historic Republican vote? Hell no.

Most of the activists I know spend most of their time doing "constituent-contact", which has replaced the "voter-contact" that was core to the Obama campaign strategy from Iowa to Denver to Washington. We spend our time actually talking to targeted lists and giving health reform supporters the tools to call and write their representatives. We've driven thousands of constituent calls into congress, as well as hundreds of hand written letters.

I want great progressive journalists like the ones at TPM to understand that the quiet story-as opposed to the raging lunatic story--of this health care fight is has been neighbors talking to neighbors at the grassroots level and we have to find a way to cover this work so that it is sustained and supported.

This phenomenon of "owning or abdicating the frame" is a bigger issue than TPM. I just used to believe that they understood it better than most.

I agree that the Obama campaign more often that not "gets it" as well. That's why they never took the bait to bash Palin for the 2 weeks she improved McCain's numbers.

However, I think the whole "White House war on Fox" meme was created by Fox News not the White House. Understanding the framing issue, they wisely decided to spin it in their interests.

They're remarkably fast at rallying their troops to the message of the day. Unfortunately the progressive communication apparatus hasn't kept pace. Nevertheless, I think outlets like TPM and 538 can make a big difference.

Unfortunately we're going to have to call them out every once in a while to get them there.

But what I'm really addressing is the editorial decision making at TPM.

This is a trend I've been ignoring for months.
But it's worth it to draw some attention because
TPM's blow horn is a lot louder than mine.

At some point, you gotta wade into the dark side in the hopes of shedding some light there!

I hear what you're saying. But the reality of grassroots politics is that earned media is like gold.

Coverage is the biggest shot in the arm you can give a group of activists.

What troubles me is that TPM is starting to follow the lead of HuffPo and give the tea-baggers way more coverage than their numbers and their tactics deserve. There was a solitary mention on TPM of OFA's 300,000 phone calls a few weeks back. But one to two thousand people at the capital get round the clock coverage?

Remember the Iraq war rallies? They demolished the tea-baggers in scale and scope (cities across the country) year after year. They seldom got a sound bite.

I don't know whether it's a liberal fetish to gloat at the opposition or what. But we're never going to win by pointing, looking, and snickering. These folks are frighteningly serious. And if we are too, we'll stop giving them the attention they don't deserve.

The OFA health care kick-off parties were held on June 6th!
I've been working with OFA all summer long and we have been advocating the public option the entire time.
If you really care about the public option, you'll get out there and do some real work for it. Cynically commenting to the choir doesn't achieve much.

The "nano-story" someone else on TPM was writing about recently was thinking along the same lines.

Your comparison to binary is excellent though.
Many really have become nothing but signal repeaters.

When we do nothing but "pass the meme" we're acting more like a technology than a human.

Or maybe I should say more like a wire than a processor.
Thanks!

Obama says "drop dead"? Sounds eerily familiar to the death panel claim we're seeing so much of.

The fact that Health Insurance Reform is even on the table at all is the President's doing.

If it weren't on his agenda, it wouldn't be on Congress' right now.

How are your own representatives voting?
Have they come out for the public option?

That's how each of us should be judged.
It indicates whether or not we've worked hard enough to give Obama the support he clearly needs to get the Public Option through congress.

But who's the real spectator here?

Is it the President who's traveling across the country on his vacation?

Or perhaps, it's the endless melodramatic blog post and response echo-chamber.

Get out and organize.

Wow, that's truly elevating Obama to mythical proportions.

Obama is one person, working in a hornets nest.

It's disingenuous to suppose that the extent of our President's influence is representative of his intentions. He's not omnipotent.

The death of hope and trust takes place in your own heart. Overcome that cynicism you become an agent of hope and trust, and you move the ball one step closer to the goal.

The fact that we're even talking about Health Care and the public option is proof that Obama has come good on his end on the deal.

He's pushing for it, but his capacity to negotiate for the public option is completely proportional to the ruckus being stirred up by Obama's supporters.

Citizens make themselves such.

Check out what they suggest by stating:

"we intend to re-think our state hosting system with data management in mind, making it easier for us to share data back and forth with state parties."

and making it a requirement to: "Formulate an easy sharing system that will allow select users of both the state party and
the national organization to tap into collected data, as well as have it feed back to our in-
house voter files."

This seems to suggest that the RNC currently maintains a separate and technically incongruous (or at least not easily matchable to) database than the state parties.

If that is truly the case, I think this is actually a very interesting proposal.

The person who wrote it may not have the skill to build what they are describing. But nevertheless if what they are describing is an attempt to integrate their data systems across states, then the RNC's VoterVault is not as advanced as we had thought. Nevertheless they're on the right track.

Campaigns are won and lost on the quality of the data.

Rather than spending resources on matching data between existing entities'databases (as one could surmise through this RFP is currently the case) the goal of centralized architecture, with custom institutional interfaces (or tenancies) is probably the right direction to go.

This pools their data resources and makes targeting more accurate, which saves material resources.