Nick Carey posts a Reuters article acknowledging the success of the right in successfully utilizing social media and community organizing tactics to win in Wisconsin:
The conservative activists have literally taken a page out of a left-wing radical’s guide to organizing – as many have read the late Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
“There was no manual for organizing on the right, so we adapted it to the conservative cause,” said Brown, of We the People of the Republic, a Tea Party group based in Madison, Wisconsin. “The left has been good at it for 100 years, so what better place to start?”
The unions, with a reputation for excelling at grass-roots organizing, not only failed to oust Walker – but he beat his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by an even bigger margin than his 2010 gubernatorial victory.
And:
“Not only is the Tea Party alive and kicking, those guys ran a great get-out-the-vote campaign,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist and chairman of the CivicForum PAC political group. “They have given away the secret recipe for what could win the election for Mitt Romney.”
“This is a paradigm shift,” added Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group chaired by former Republican House of Representatives Majority leader Dick Armey that provides training and resources to Tea Party activists. “If the grassroots embrace a cause, they make all the difference.”
It makes a difference, too, if the grassroots don’t want to be there in the first place. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to blog. And I bet a lot of the grassroots didn’t want to be out there knocking on doors. I’d venture to guess that many were even resentful that the recall forced them to be out there. Because that’s how I feel. The idiots in charge have forced me to become involved through their incompetence, their obtuse, destructive partisan governance, their divisive rhetoric and “wars” on whatever. And I’m not just angry about it. I’m absolutely seething. Wisconsin may have been satisfying. But it was a bucket of water on a nuclear meltdown.
#WAR