Following Barack Obama's triumph at the polls in 2008, the Republicans decided they'd better learn how to use the new media more effectively. John Boehner put out a call to all Congressional staff members to "get themselves on YouTube and Twitter" as he had already.
Republican House members have more than twice as many followers as their Democratic counterparts — about 1.3 million versus roughly 600,000 — and are far more active on Twitter with more than 157,000 individual Twitter messages, versus roughly 62,000 for Democrats.
“Once Republicans get their act together, they are really good at organizing,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, which studies how technology is changing politics. Republicans in the House are using technology “in order to blunt the power of the White House in a new political media ecology that benefits from speed,” he said.
But if officials at the White House were to apply a hashtag to the opposition’s Twitter efforts, it might be #notimpressed.
“The Republicans in Congress are using new media technology to compete for the attention of Beltway reporters,” said Josh Earnest, the White House deputy press secretary. “We use it to compete for the attention of the American people,” he said, pointing to interactive forums that the White House conducts. “These are two different goals.” ...NYT
In Boehner's office, they have twitter meetings every day, deciding what to say. But there's a question whether their tippity-tapping little Republican fingers are backed up by solid human intelligence. When it comes to brainwork surpassing 140 characters, the Dems are on the winning side.
... Left-leaning organizations like Moveon.org and Think Progress are widely viewed, even among Republicans, as surpassing their conservative counterparts on the new media playing field.
