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Rumblings In The Republican Blogosphere

This has been a busy personnel week on the Republican side of the blogosphere, marked by two noteworthy hirings in the Senate and the departure of a new-media-unfriendly communications director on the House side.

Jon Henke started the week with news of his hiring as the new media director for new Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Henke bolstered his blogospheric reputation after a brief stint on the unsuccessful re-election campaign of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., and his pending move from his Richmond, Va., home to Washington has won praise (some of it grudging) from friend and foe alike.

"Unlike most of the wingnutosphere, Henke is a genuine strategic thinker who understands the dynamics of Internet politics and the game of modern communications," Matt Stoller wrote at MyDD. "He's not inward looking and he gets that the right has to seriously invest and change their institutional framework to catch up to us. This is an excellent hire by McConnell, and it suggests he will be a very formidable leader."

Robert Bluey of The Right Angle at Human Events Online agreed. "The move also illustrates that Republicans are finally starting to realize the positive impact bloggers can have when trying to craft a message and effectively communicate it to an audience that doesn't want to be treated the same way as the press corps," he said.

Bluey benefited from the other hiring in the Senate. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., hired blogger Tim Chapman away from the Heritage Foundation, and Bluey will replace Chapman at Heritage's Center for Media and Public Affairs (where I recently accepted an invitation to be on an advisory board comprised of journalists and bloggers).

Chapman will be DeMint's senior communications adviser and promised, "Conservative bloggers will have a friend and a resource in Senator DeMint, no doubt about it."

Carl Forti, who just left his job on the House side, could not have said the same in his role as the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. When I spoke to him about blogs a little more than a year ago, here is what he said: "A lot of times, you just don't know how reliable the information on these things is. ... Ninety percent of the time, we know more than they do."

Forti's former boss, Thomas Reynolds of New York, felt the wrath of those "unreliable" blogs this year when news broke that Reynolds allegedly knew about former Rep. Mark Foley soliciting teenage. male congressional pages but did nothing about it.

Whether Reynolds' replacement at the NRCC, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, and his new spokesman will be more new-media-savvy remains to be seen, but Matt Lewis of The Right Angle is hopeful for the New Year. "Clearly," he wrote, "one lesson Republican candidates learned in 2006 was that failing to be proactive in the blogosphere was a costly mistake -- a mistake they aren't likely to repeat in 2007."

Patrick Ruffini knew that lesson before the election and has been trying to apply it in his job as the e-campaign director of the Republican National Committee. Now Ruffini also is back to blogging (a move celebrated by Bluey) at the site that bears his name. "These are interesting times," he said in his resurrection post. "And the blogosphere is where the fight will be waged, and won."

Correction: A reader named DJ correctly noted in the comments that Reynolds is still in Congress. I have corrected that error of mine in the text above.

Posted by Danny | 12:43 PM

Comments

More evidence of the relevance of the blogosphere.

TexasRainmaker | 01.04.07 03:01 PM

Uh, I think Tom Reynolds is still in Congress. He won re-election with 52% of the vote in 2006.

DJ | 01.04.07 03:29 PM

Clearly the evidence supports the need to renovate the right wing blogosphere. Some recognition of reality might help. Glen provides the evidence at:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/credibility-of-right-wing-blogosphere.html

Randomizer | 01.05.07 11:33 AM

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