Anyone who has spent a good deal of time working in politics will tell you how annoying it is that everyone else considers themselves an expert on politics. That doesn’t happen in other fields. I read about technology, but I don’t consider myself an engineer. I would never walk up to a guy that installs robotics units in semi-conductor plants and tell him what he’s doing wrong, or all the problems with robotics.

For some reason, though, nobody feels any compunction to remain silent on matters of politics when talking to professional campaign hacks. Suddenly they are experts on what it takes to organize and mobilize supporters around a cause. That’s where Anders Bylund comes in.

In prehistoric times, i.e., before the Internet, getting a political movement off the ground meant getting your hands dirty. You had to go find your target audience and talk to them, find volunteers to go knocking on doors or cold-call people on the phone. There were letters to write and envelopes to stuff, and it was just a lot of work. Then along came the ‘Net, where you could publish one web page and the whole world could find it. Easy-to-use e-mail lists, and later on, instant messaging and blogs, also helped simplifying the process of drumming up support from your friends, neighbors, and countrymen.

The article goes on to quote the same Democrat stooges who believe that Internet activists represent some surge in civic involvement, rather than recognizing them for what they are – the grassroots of America’s political structure.

I wrote a piece for the e-Voter Institute’s book Crossing the River: The Coming of Age of the Internet in Politics and Advocacy on this very topic. Republicans, after the 2000 election, looked at their narrow loss and realized that they needed to reconnect with the grassroots – to do the hard work of organizing. Democrats failed to grasp that point and, instead, stumbled into 2004 under the same failed roadmap they had used in every election since Kennedy.

The Democrats did, however, get lucky. Howard Dean, in a fluke accident, reconnected with the grassroots of the party and began to get them moving – online. Unfortunately, the Democrats saw this not as the grassroots of their party (and a rabidly liberal grassroots at that) but as a social movement indicating that they would be swept into power in a Reagan-esque landslide.

When it all shook out, the GOP, who had spent their time doing the “hard work” that Ars Technica seems to believe is no longer necessary given the advent of the Internet, beat Kerry by nearly 4 million votes. The difference was a focus on organizing – rather than a belief that with Meetup organizing would take care of itself.

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