Morning Jolt - What I Saw at the BlogCon Revolution

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

April 23, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. Apoplectic beyond Words -- or at Least a Public Comment

2. What I Saw at the BlogCon Revolution

3. A First Glimpse at Occupy Unmasked

4. Addenda

Here's your Monday Morning Jolt! First, the headlines . . .

Enjoy.

Jim

1. Apoplectic beyond Words -- or at Least a Public Comment

Relax, America. President Obama is as mad about the General Services Administration as you are -- or at least his staff insists that's the case.

President Barack Obama is "apoplectic" about lavish spending at the GSA, one of his top advisers said Sunday.

"On the GSA issue, he was I think it's fair to say apoplectic," said David Axelrod, said on NBC's "Meet the Press. "Because we made a big effort to cut waste, inefficiency, fraud against government, saved tens of billions of dollars doing it on just this very kind of thing. And so this was very enraging to him, and, of course, he acted quickly, the administration acted quickly and changed the management there."

I asked the other day if Obama himself had issued any statement on the GSA. I haven't gone through every one of the president's remarks in the past three weeks, but a cursory look didn't reveal any comments from the president himself on this.

Keep in mind that this story broke on April 2, when the chief of the GSA resigned, two of her top deputies were fired, and four managers were placed on leave. In that time, President Obama has weighed in on the Trayvon Martin case (okay, technically that was a few days before) and the dispute between the U.K. and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and joked about how his foreign summits help him scout vacation spots for Michelle and Kanye West again.

So if Obama's really apoplectic about this waste of taxpayer money, great. But we hear Obama fume about wasteful government spending all too rarely, and it doesn't seem to be something that bothers him as much as, say, the tax rate for corporate-jet owners or the persistent, yet unproven, rumors of oil-market speculators increasing the price of gas, or the 4,000 or so taxpayers who would be affected by the Buffett Rule. This is the guy who argued we needed financial reform because Wall Street and big financial institutions were taking unreasonable risks with their customers' money, and in the same press conference then said that it was not merely proper but necessary for the federal government to be investing the taxpayers' money in risky ventures such as Solyndra. To Obama, some taxpayer money being lost on ventures that never pay off is just part of doing business, so to speak.

Andre Tartar of New York magazine notices:

Whether he's apoplectic on principle or because $820,000 in taxpayer money spent on mind-readers and sushi is exactly the kind of headache one doesn't need in an election year is unclear, but those with an ax to grind are certainly underscoring the latter issue. Political free agent Joe Lieberman took to CBS's Face the Nation to call the situation "really outrageous -- for me, sickening" as he pointed out eight party "planning" trips that cost taxpayers (almost) $150,000. And though he did say that this "doesn't represent what I know to be most people who work for the federal government," he still placed the blame squarely on President Obama's shoulders. In his opinion, it's "fair to hold a president accountable" when the federal government misbehaves.

2. What I Saw at the BlogCon Revolution

What is BlogCon? It's a gathering of about 250 conservative bloggers, tweeters, podcasters, YouTube artistic geniuses, policy wonks, and other folks for presentations on how to be more effective at what we do, some policy briefings from experts, and a lot of after-hours socializing, getting to know the people you've been reading for a long time as flesh-and-blood people.

Tabitha Hale of the Franklin Center put it together, aiming for a more intimate, personal event to bring conservative bloggers together. CPAC is wonderful, but it brings in thousands upon thousands of people, and you inevitably never have the time to connect and meet all the people you would like to meet. The political world has plenty of conventions, but BlogCon stands out for putting faces behind the names and tiny, little square portraits you encounter on Twitter and around the blogosphere. I hope they do these forever.

Alex Lundry and PoliticalMath put together a fantastic presentation on data visualization, and PM has posted his slides here. His video, putting the spending rates of recent presidents in perspective as a cross-country road trip, can be found here.

The person at the convention who had been blogging the longest? Sean Hackbarth. Apparently he started with cave etchings.

Upon hearing the news that Senator Orrin Hatch would face a primary challenge, Kristina Ribali, director of new media at FreedomWorks, let out a howl so loud that one momentarily feared that a crate of live scorpions had been released at the convention site.

The crew at Breitbart.com were presented this beautiful piece of artwork, depicting their founder in his own words.

The conversations offered an eclectic range of topics, from the upcoming Texas Senate primary with the Red Redhead, the apparent meltdown of the Minnesota Republicans with EyeOnPolitics and GOPrincess, how the term "RINO" gets tossed around all too easily with Keder, Exurban Jon and OHCONSERVATISM, comparing parenting stories with Cheryl Prater, and discussing the fascinatingly broad demographic appeal of Paul Ryan with Kat McKinley.

For those of you who have ever wondered about suing a foe on the Internet for calling you racist, sexist, or some other egregious and obviously false insult, let civil litigator, Breitbart.com contributor, and weapons-grade-sarcasm master Kurt Schlichter explain a major complication.

"Here's why you don't want to sue some liberal troll for libel," Kurt explained patiently. "They have no money. I don't want to sue a guy who lives in a van down by the river. If he has riverfront property, let's talk."

A portion of my remarks, kicking off the second day's proceedings:

I started with National Review doing the Kerry Spot in 2004 -- this was when doing a blog about nothing but campaign news seemed kind of insane. And if you were following politics that year, you know that every Democrat you knew thought that not only was Kerry going to win, but it was going to be decisive.

And one of the reasons Democrats were utterly convinced that they were going to win was they believed they had the better get-out-the-vote operation.

For several cycles, most notably in 1998 and 2000, they had seen great results from the organizations of the labor unions and African-American churches. And heading into 2004, they had big expensive organizations that had enormous resources, and this was something that every Republican openly acknowledged that they could not match.

The George Soros group, Americans Coming Together, hired a bunch of ex-cons to go door to door and register voters. "Hey, unregistered voter, please give all of your personal information including parts of your Social Security number or driver's license number to these guys convicted of burglary, forgery, drug dealing, assault and sex offenses."

And what happens when you pay people by the number of people they register is they end up just filling out names. This is how Mickey Mouse ends up on the voter rolls.

Karl Rove and the Bush campaign said, "We're never going to be able to outspend the unions and the Soros groups. So we're going to do something different; we're going to use our volunteers, and we're going to have them talk to their neighbors and friends and people they already know." They particularly aimed for Little League coaches and people who volunteer in their churches.

In late October in the state of Florida in 2004, 25 percent of registered voters report being contacted by a Bush-Cheney volunteer, most often members of their church or community organization or neighbor. About 19 percent of registered voters [had] been contacted on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, but the vast majority of these contacts [were] by paid temps of the campaign, the DNC, or a related 527.

Think about it, every television and radio commercial, every piece of direct mail, every e-mail, every mass-market, impersonal message a campaign sends to you and every other voter -- the whole thing could be a bunch of lies. In fact, it probably is. Every stranger who knocks on your door -- who the hell are they? Why should you listen to them? What do they know? Why should you trust them? They don't know you. They don't know your problems. How would they know which candidate is better for you?

But -- when you think of your friends, your family and relatives, your neighbors, everyone you know personally, and who you probably bonded with over matters beyond politics -- those people trust you. Those people will listen to you. You have credibility with your readers, with your listeners, with your viewers. But you also have credibility off-line, in the people you interact with, face-to-face.

Think about times you've changed your mind on something. Maybe it's come from something you read online or saw on television, but I'm guessing that's fairly rare, or at least less frequent than somebody you respect offering an argument, with new information, that makes you see the topic in a new light.

Very few things can make someone rethink their position than a person they trust saying, "I think you're making a mistake on this." . . .

So I would say, go through your social networks, and think about the people you know, who you physically interact with, offline, who meet that criteria of, that person could be active in the causes we believe in. Suck them in. We are the gateway drug.

3. A First Glimpse at Occupy Unmasked

The keynote speaker at BlogCon's Charlotte gathering was originally scheduled to be Andrew Breitbart.

Shortly before his death, Breitbart was working with Stephen Bannon (who recently made the Sarah Palin biography/documentary The Undefeated) on a new film about the Occupy protesters entitled Occupy Unmasked, and about 40 minutes of the rough cut were screened in Charlotte.

I probably should be cautious about assessing a movie based upon a small, early portion. But permit me to give you a preview.

(Before I begin, I'll observe that seeing new footage of someone you knew who has passed away is a bit like seeing a ghost. There was this audible intake of air the first time the movie featured Breitbart's voice; he's the narrator of the tale.)

Looking back -- and who knows if the Occupy-protest story is really over -- something about those protests didn't make sense. We saw loud, angry, widespread, heavily organized, and oftentimes violent protests with only the most generic of causes or demands. There was never any particular bill these people wanted passed -- no particular reform or personnel change. At times it amounted to a giant, multi-city temper tantrum about life not being fair.

Occupy Unmasked suggests that the point was to generate an emotional reaction in everyone who participated and witnessed it. Bannon's film goes through how the organizers aimed to provoke conflicts with police and distribute images of them beating up noble college kids who just wanted to end economic inequality. In short, the aim was to convince enough Americans that no law change or reform could solve this problem -- that the corruption and exploitation within our society were so deep and pervasive that only tearing down the whole system would suffice. (They also sought to intimidate those who wished to dissent from the Occupy message.)

Bannon's cut currently uses the soundtrack to the Batman film The Dark Knight, heightening the sense of chilling villainy and sinister manipulation; it's something of an inside joke since this summer's upcoming The Dark Knight Rises appears to have villains Bane and Catwoman espousing Occupy-style rhetoric to justify their crimes.

Of course, here we are, months later, and the filth in the parks is cleaned up, most of the kids have gone home, and our more-or-less free-market system remains intact. Did Occupy fail? Or are there now quiet armies of radicalized young people ready to answer the next call to revolution? I suspect that the Occupy organizers underestimated the risks of mobilizing an army of malcontents.

The little villages of perpetual despair that this movement assembled -- the Nazi-endorsed lice-infested rape camps -- offered a vision of a society that was as thoroughly dystopian as any zombie apocalypse film. Has anyone ever really wanted to poop on a police car? Does smashing the lobby of a bank do anything to actually improve your life?

4. Addenda

The joke repeated roughly 10,000 times at BlogCon: "Say, did you hear President Obama ate a dog?"

I cannot believe that this comment from Mitt Romney in my interview with him on Thursday didn't generate bigger buzz.

When asked about the GSA scandal, Romney said, "I think the example starts at the top. People have to see that the president is not taking elaborate vacations and spending in a way that is inconsistent with the state of the overall economy and the state of the American family."