Who said being a "community organizer" doesn't prepare you for anything? The governing part may be a little dicey, but you sure know how to campaign. And now we all know now about the Obama organization. Obviously, GOP needs one.
But in the run-up to 2016, we also need to find a way to extend our reach in popular culture. That's because -- as Mark Halperin has noted -- the left is going to try make every viable GOP contender unacceptable in the eyes of the public before the 2016 season even starts off.
Obviously, if the right stooped to such tactics, the MSM would be in full howl, decrying the ugliness of conservatives and the "politics of personal destruction." But they'll be as acquiscent when the left does it here forward as they were throughout the 2012 presidential season, when they stood by and allowed a good man's reputation to be smeared by an incumbent president, whose allies wrongly accused of murder and whose own campaign presented an ad replete with the echoes of racial bigotry from the past.
The GOP has to come up with a strategy that will allow it effectively to push back against preemptive smearing. To do so, conservatives must find a better way to interface with the popular culture that promotes -- or at least enables -- such smearing on the assumption that left is cool and right is wrong. The question is how "dissenters" can effectively infiltrate a cultural landscape dominated by intolerant liberals?
Update: At First Things, Pete Spiliakos comes up with a similar point, elegantly presented, along with an idea:
My first suggestion is for conservative donors to change their funding priorities. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on vacuous thirty second election year ads that are designed to make microscopic gains among middle-class, middle-age, white women. Most of those dollars would be better spent on longer ads that have something real to say and that air between elections on media that is mostly watched by nonconservatives.
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