I kept on saying this….

This is the first time in a Presidential cycle as a news / political junkie.  Oh, I’d get the phone calls, and I’d get the mailings.  In the past, the former were just plain annoying.  The latter got quickly looked at – if I disagreed with it, rubbish time quick.  If I agreed with it, I’d read it to find the nuances.

Now, I’ve come to learn that money is the mother’s milk of politics – more money is more messaging and more name recognition – and generally more votes.  Here in NH, the Dems running for Senate out raised and spent the Republicans $1.7 to $1 million.  The Senate PAC (Political Action Committees)?  Dems = $930K.  Repubs?  $151K.  A six to one advantage.  Money does a lot of talking, so, I could understand why almost every Republican mailing had requests for money. 

Sidenote: The annoying, the REALLY, REALLY annoying ones are those flim-flam phony "polls" from the national Repubs that end up with requests for hundreds of dollars.  Don’t insult me with sham polls any longer.

If you are a Republican, you got asked for money; a lot of times you were asked for money.   But I ask -how many times were you asked to help out with your time and your talent -> especially early in the campaigning?  A lot?  Sometimes?  Or only in the last week a couple of times?

Over at The Next Right, Soren Dayton brings this up as well.  But puts a different spin on it:

In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”…

The cutting edge technology (at least for campaigning) was in its proper place – it was not front and center but was in it’s proper place – a force multiplier.  It took the proper orientation – on people and NOT on the technology – and allowed motivated, organized people to operate independently of the campaign or further blast out a common message.  It allowed them to work.  And more importantly, recruit more.

The emphasis was on people.  And ours? 

You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.

Well, since this is just another series of "what’s wrong", "what’s next", and "things to fix" – that’s one.  And in the same vein, he adds:

But just as Obama’s organization has partially transformed the Democratic Party and Dean’s organization definititely did, the Republican Party will probably be transformed by a shift to a focus on grassroots. Some thoughts on how:

1. The power of the donor class will be signficantly reduced as it shifts to the grassroots.
2. This party would likely involve an overthrow of the current party leadership. And I don’t necessarily mean at the RNC, but down at the county party level.
3. A party with that level of grassroots activity and energy might be more ideologically broadly-based than our current party.

That would be a fundamentally different Republican Party, and one that is focused on the voters and the activists and the donors rather than the intrigue of Washington, which has been so much the focus of the party.

So, fundamental question – how come the Republicans don’t ask more often for peoples’ TIME?  What is more important to most – Time or Money?  Money – a one time gift.  Time – as Obama has just shown us – is the gift that keeps on giving.

So, in that light, what IS more important, eh?

The activists.  Right now, here in NH, they are the ones that hold the power (but may not know it just yet).  Those informal networks between the groups is getting the messaging done, is getting the philosophical thrashing out onto deck and scrubbed down.  The Party?

I think, at least in this County, Soren is right.  The reason the nation of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years was to allow the current leaders to go away and allow new ones to lead the nation into the Promised Land.

You know, I might not be able to type anymore at that age…here’s for hoping that voice recognition (neural implants???) will be working REALLY well by then…