LAS VEGAS -- Conservative bloggers are more independent than their liberal counterparts. That is a key theme of the Right OnLine conference hosted at the Venetian Hotel by Americans for Prosperity.
Connecting this close to home, Dr. Melissa Clouthier, a Houstonian whose popular twitter handle is @MelissaTweets, led a panel on how to organize conservatives via the Internet. At that panel discussion, several of the speakers noted that Democrats have several donors who are – for all intents and purposes – on campaign payroll, whereas most conservatives bloggers are doing so of their own resources. In other words, internet liberals are about organizing while internet conservatives are about communicating.
A perfect example is Texas’s
Burnt Orange Report. The blog basically distributes candidate and party talking points. The folks that run Burnt Orange Report
admit on their own website, that they do paid political consulting for campaigns.
Bluntly, George Soros and the other key Democratic donors see the Internet as an organizing mechanism and are willing to fund it as such. There are paid liberal bloggers all over this land.
LSR, which is published by a non-profit foundation not connected with a political campaign, is the exception rather than the rule on conservative bloggers. We have full-time staff.
But most conservative bloggers are just average people who are fed up with liberal government excess and want to express their concerns. They are not controlled by any political campaign. Their primary alliance is to ideas, not specific candidates.
Don’t get me wrong, conservatives are discovering the Internet as an organizing tool. Gov. Rick Perry’s new media director, Will Franklin, is a speaker at this conference. But when conservative candidates use new media they are upfront about who they are and that it is controlled by the campaign. All of Perry’s new media efforts are clearly labeled as products of Texans for Rick Perry.
In short, there’s a significant difference between the blogosphere on the right and the blogosphere on the left. May the best ideas win.