Republicans feel the pull, mimic liberals

By J. Patrick Coolican

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS MORRIS

First they mocked it, then they attacked it, and now they're trying to copy it.

That's the short history of conservatives' relationship with MoveOn.org, the online liberal interest group that grows more influential all the time.

Now, one of Nevada's leading Republican operatives, Sig Rogich, who was a key aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is trying to create a conservative version of MoveOn to match its organizing and fundraising prowess, a key to Democrats taking back Congress last year.

The effort was first reported in The Politico, a Washington publication devoted to national politics. An assistant to Rogich said he was traveling Tuesday and couldn't be reached.

Rogich's partner in the effort is Bradley Blakeman, a former aide to President Bush and experienced Republican operative. Blakeman told the Sun the group would "give voice and hope to conservatives," focusing on low taxes and a strong national defense, and said more information would be forthcoming.

Unlike MoveOn, which began on a shoestring, the new group is said to be already well funded. The very existence of the effort offers clues about how much politics has changed since 2004, when talk of a permanent Republican majority was in the air.

"The Republicans are in a dismal state," said David Lublin, an American University political scientist. Republican fortunes are tethered to the Iraq war and Bush, whose approval rating has sunk into the 20s. The party is struggling to raise money and recruit candidates, and its presidential field is considered weaker than the Democrats'.

In short, conservatives need an infusion of energy, like the kind MoveOn has given liberal Democrats during the past decade.

The group began when two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, disdainful of the atmosphere surrounding the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, circulated an online petition asking Congress to censure him and "move on" - hence the name. They quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. The group outlasted the impeachment to take up a host of liberal causes, protesting the Iraq war and working to unseat Bush in 2004.

Conservatives have long attacked MoveOn as out of the mainstream, and still like to remind the public that MoveOn took $2.5 million from financier George Soros in its effort to beat Bush. (MoveOn has changed its tax status and now takes donations capped by campaign finance laws. Soros hasn't given since the 2004 election cycle.)

The attacks, like the current mimicry, are a recognition that MoveOn has quickly become an important player in American politics.

"There's no question it has influence," said Robert Uithoven, a Nevada Republican consultant.

During the 2006 cycle, MoveOn raised $28 million from 200,000 donors. It has also mastered media stunts and developed its own technologically enabled political ground game. Joel Middleton and Donald Green, Yale University political scientists who are experts in voter turnout, analyzed the behavior of 41,654 voters in nine swing states in the 2004 election and determined that contact with MoveOn volunteers increased voter turnout by 7 percentage points, a number to make political operatives salivate.

Whether Rogich and company can effectively duplicate MoveOn on the right is an open question.

MoveOn membership growth has been driven by two factors, said Tom Matzzie, the group's Washington director: active participation of its members, who are polled online to determine what issues to take up and even the specifics of how the group should push its agenda , and anger at Bush.

As Uithoven said, "Anger can be a powerful motivating factor."

The problem for Republicans is that, as Lublin said, the word to describe Republicans right now isn't angry, but "demoralized."

Moreover, a successful Web presence requires a real dialogue, lest viewers and readers lose interest. But Republicans are traditionally more top-down and not likely given to the back-and-forth of a structure like MoveOn, said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland/Baltimore County who also writes for the liberal magazine American Prospect.

Still, struggling political parties and interest groups, like threatened species, often adapt and successfully copy tactics of their opponents, said Brian Balogh, a historian of American political development at the University of Virginia.

He pointed to the religious right copying the methods and language of the civil rights movement.

Schaller pointed out, however, that often pure plagiarism doesn't work.

"You don't try to mimic exactly . You try to develop a comparable response," he said.

So for instance, talk radio will never work very well for liberals, but they've been able to use blogs and the Internet in the same way conservatives rely on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.