Social networking key to Brown’s success: Pajamas Media lead story

"Been following your coverage of the MA senate election and was wondering if you wanted to write a piece for PJ Media about it," Pajamas Media's Chicago Editor Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse emailed yesterday evening:

It will be a challenge; we're looking for 800 words of the kind of local color you've been writing about blended with some analysis by noon on Wednesday. Perhaps if you could give us some more personal reflections of both you and those you've met in MA, that would complement another piece we'll have on pretty much the straight politics of it.

Piece of cake. Nerve-wracking to work under deadline, but it gets the creative juices flowing, and besides, our frenetic send-Mr-Brown-to-Washington blogathon of the last couple of weeks had prepared us to focus and produce. Word count is a snap with free online count tool. As per PJM policy, a short excerpt below. Click here to read the whole thing. Update: The full article is now crossposted below:

Social Networking Key to Brown’s Success
The inside story of how Tea Party twitterers, Facebook friends, and Blogspot buddies helped win the race for Scott Brown.

The big story of the Massachusetts special election was so small it flew in under the radar of the old-boy networks and their allies in the legacy media.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote way back in 1999 — prefiguring locally what is happening now on a national scale — "The powers-that-be aren’t anymore." When Tennessee poobahs tried to ram through higher taxes that year, opponents "simply bypassed the traditional gatekeepers in the media and took their case directly to the people. The people responded."

That's what happened in Massachusetts yesterday. Republican Scott Brown and his Army of Davids bypassed the gatekeepers who would have us believing the Democrat establishment's hand-picked candidate, Martha Coakley, was a shoo-in. The citizens were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore, and thanks to the viral nature of electronic social networks like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they started to find and encourage each other to create an "intelligent crowd" that took its first baby steps at the Tea Parties and Town Halls of last year, then found its voice in embracing Scott Brown's long-shot candidacy during the whirlwind six weeks between his primary win December 8 and the January 19 special election.

As Jonathan Hoenig wrote about the Tea Partiers when we were just getting started last April, "They're angry about the taxes, yes, but they're really angry about the philosophy behind the taxes, and that's collectivism," a point consistently lost upon Northeast Corridor elites from both sides of the aisle, who fiddled while Rome burned, amusing each other by dissing us as lunatic-fringe "teabaggers."

Blogging was my own gateway to the Tea Party movement. A former armchair activist, I had ventured into the blogosphere first as a visitor just before 9/11 and then as an active participant a couple of years later. Here was a way to say what was on your mind and reach like-minded — and sometimes dislike-minded —souls out there in cyberspace. Links from other blogs, large and small, extended your audience, and some of the people you met through blogging would become good friends. Then came the 2008 Presidential election, and things turned serious. You watched in horror as the Obama juggernaut mobilized to ram a collectivist nightmare down the throats of the American people. By then you'd become an obsessive twitterer with over 1,000 followers, a purveyor of what Jordan Raynor calls "crowd-sourced journalism," able to spread the word almost instantaneously from your own followers to your followers' followers, a smart mob self-organizing to pursue a shared goal. Driven by a visceral fear that the lights were about to go out on the Shining City Upon a Hill, thousands of believers in American exceptionalism began to apply the online social-networking skills they had developed as amateurs in a virtual life-or-death struggle.

Starting December 9, the day after Scott Brown's primary victory, bloggers like myself and Cornell Prof. William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection took Bill Kristol's idea to make Scott Brown's race a "referendum on Obamacare" and ran with it. We both communicated directly with the campaign through Facebook and Twitter, and both burst out of our virtual worlds from time to time to help get out the vote by phone banking at regional offices. At campaign headquarters in Needham one day, Jacobson was actually kicked off the phone "because I was spending too much time on Twitter!" Blogging and twittering our on-the-ground experiences, from phone banking to informal exit polling, fired up our readers — from Massachusetts, around the country and beyond —  to contribute and volunteer.

The campaign itself was totally social-networking savvy. As New York Times columnist Russ Douthat wrote, Brown "used Internet fundraising to put the fear of God into" the old-boy network. If you were from out of state or unable to come in to one of the regional offices to phone bank, they had the technology to allow you to make calls from home.

Like-minded big-time bloggers like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Michelle Malkin showered Prof. Jacobson, myself and others with links. The message had gone viral, and the comments and tweets poured in, a groundswell of Tea Party Fever that would bring in dollars and volunteer time to get out the vote and help sweep our long-shot candidate to an astonishing 52-to-47 percent victory, with one in five Democrats supporting Brown, "who benefited from high suburban turnout" according to a Rasmussen Reports poll, enough of an edge so the Beacon Hill machine couldn't cheat.

"Winning is fun," fellow blogger-in-arms Dan Riehl of The Riehl Review twittered on victory night, adding the "beauty of New Media is getting local perspective." Indeed. The ability of bloggers on the ground "behind enemy lines" to use social-networking tools to share experiences instantaneously with hundreds of thousands of Tea Party sympathizers across the nation and the world is akin, perhaps, to the way Radio Free Europe was once used to give hope to oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain.

No longer dependent upon legacy media to tell our story, we are able — in Glenn Reynolds's formulation — to disintermediate the old-boy networks via the internet.

Sissy Willis is a Tea Party Fever sufferer who blogs and twitters behind enemy lines in Taxachusetts.

Comments

[Omnibus Driver]

I have never before donated to an out-of-state candidate, and I did it not once, but twice, for Scott Brown, based in good part on your coverage of what he stood for, as much as what he stood against.

I know my little truck bomb for Brown" wasn't a big thing, but it did demonstrate that people outside of the Bay State were also VERY passionate in their support of what Scott Brown offers all of us who are sick to death of the "Hope and Change" mantra that never spelled out just exactly what "hope" or "change" Chicken Little was talking about.

I am energized like never before by ordinary people who've had entirely enough of entitled people deciding how our money is spent.

God bless you, Mr. Jacobson and the rest of the pissed off, disenfranchised, educated, working, put-upon tax base who've had enough of carrying the overly-entitled, underly educated population on our shoulders.

Count me among your many intelligent fans.

[Americaneocon]

American Power tracked-back with, 'Scott Brown's Social Networking Election'.

[brooklyn]

More excellent kudos for the mighty SISU, with requested articles of substance.

The tech empowerment via these networks is truly interesting and you state it well.

It is always interesting how quickly things change, and this massive teachable moment in MASS, remains a stunner.

Here is another interesting alteration in perception via a Democratic Partisan, first encountered on Mr. Suber's fine blog:
"America Betrayed President Bush"

[gs]

I won't cut and paste my comment on your PJM piece, but I'll link it.

Omnibus Driver, I too hardly ever donate out of state (or to Democrats), but so far I feel good about the exception I made for Jim Webb.

[Stoutcat]

Great work, Sissy! And congrats on the PJM article, very well done indeed!

[Retriever]

Yay! And good for you for your contributions writing and toiling, Sissy! To quote Monty Python, "and there was much rejoicing!" And now my joy would be complete if a certain fearless Great Reader stopped reminding me quite so much of brave, brave, brave Sir Robin (who lacks gumption and honor).

[Teresa]

Wonderful job Sissy! Not only with the PJM article, but with all the blogging, tweeting, and fb'ing during the campaign. Hard work once again gets the job done. You go girl!

[Social Network Design]

Sissy. I appreciate this post. You have done a nice job.