My friends over at the Speaker’s office were featured in Congressional Quarterly recognizing the success of their blogger outreach. This credit is long overdue. Occasionally you’ll read some press about the efforts of the Republican conference to involve bloggers in their communications program, but the real substantial work in this area is being done in the Democratic Party by the Speaker’s Office.
Karina, Jesse and Erica have posted tons of content online making our work in Washington more transparent and bringing government closer to the people we serve.
Blogs on the left find their strength and influence as a user-generated movement. The Democratic Party has always been a bottom-up structure where our strength comes from individuals, organizations and grassroots activity. Republicans employ a top-down structure that keeps their message focused, but marginalizes the influence of innovators at the grassroots level. Those innovators for the Democrats created ActBlue, MoveOn.org, and scores of blogs that actually helped win elections and change the debate in Washington.
This excerpt from the CQ article shows why the Republican method of outreach to the online community fails to benefit from such innovators:
[S]enators are genuinely interested in the grass-roots interactions, noting that even if you take the cynical view and see them as only using the medium to promote an agenda, it still shows the enhanced clout bloggers now have in Congress.
Pelosi’s office gets it and that’s why their work is complementary to bloggers instead of “using the medium to promote an agenda.”
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