Reply #14: The right had an advantage on the first generation of computerized politics

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The strategy they perfected going back to the 1970's involved computerized mailing lists, often assembled by sending out fundraising appeals and keeping lists of the people who responded -- with different right-wing organizations then swapping lists around to create master lists.

These master lists were then used in targeted last-minute get-out-the-vote operations, which were often extremely effective. Several of the campaign funding scandals since the 1990's have involved last-minute infusions of cash, which were devoted to get-out-the-vote efforts and which came late enough that they didn't have to be reported until after the the election. And cases where elections appeared to have been stolen because the results did not match earlier polls were regularly explained away as the result of a superior get-out-the-vote effort.

These tactics have worked well for them -- so well that the Koch brothers are now reportedly compiling the mother of all mailing lists for use in 2012. But that was only the first computer generation -- and it was overwhelmingly centralized, top-down, and tangled up with illegal campaign practices.

It was also essentially pre-Internet.

The right continued to have an edge in the early days of the Internet -- the Drudge Report, for example. But the wider Net access became -- blogs, social media -- the more the left swarmed in and took over. And they did it in a decentralized, bottom-up manner that baffles the right.

This is one reason the right keeps coming up with screwy conspiracy theories involving ACORN being behind OWS. It's not just that they're trying to slime the left. It's that they can't conceive of a political movement that isn't based on secret money-men and behind-the-scenes puppet masters. They really believe that's the way the universe works, and it's going to mislead them at every turn.

It's become commonplace to say that new-era politics boil down to the power of money vs. the power of an engaged populace. But it isn't just about power -- it's about the way that power is organized. And the right has a complete blind spot about the way power works on the left that is now their greatest weakness.