The Underground Conservative

The Hill takes a look at the role right-wing bloggers hope to play in rebuilding the Republican Party and taking it back to prominence.

A Washington in the hands of Democrats offers online pundits on the right a fresh political target and a chance to vent against their ideological opponents. The reverse scenario allowed their liberal counterparts to blossom during the blogosphere’s infancy, when the GOP controlled the Congress and the Bush administration held power between 2003 and 2006.

But the aptly named “rightosphere,” much like its liberal counterpart, “the netroots,” doesn’t simply want to criticize the other team. It sees this as its time to reshape the Republican Party.

“The rightosphere will be much better when the right has something to oppose,” said Jon Henke, who writes at The Next Right.

Obama and Democrats will eventually provide conservatives with a “unifying grievance” that they can seize on. On the Democratic agenda could be universal healthcare proposals that would expand government programs, union-backed card-check legislation that would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections when unionizing, and calls to reverse momentum to expand offshore drilling, Henke said.

Being in the opposition is also a natural posture for conservatives, who want smaller government but have seen GOP lawmakers in the last few years create more federal programs, expand the deficit and spend greater sums of taxpayer dollars.

“It’s hard to be anti-state when you are state,” Henke said.

There’s a major role for nationally prominent bloggers play at the national level, as well as the bloggers operating state-oriented blogs do in state-level politics. Conservatives have to be outspoken and assertive; the pending civil war over who has control of the GOP is not going to be pleasant. The Old Guard, the blueblood countryclubbers who have called themselves conservatives, allowed the Drive By Media to redefine conservatism using them, the Rockefeller Bush Republicans, those who care most about getting invites to the really cool DC cocktail parties where all the popular kids hang out, won’t go down easy.

One concrete way conservative bloggers hope to increase their influence is by forcing party leaders to embrace new technologies. Rebuild the Party, a coalition of bloggers and top Republican Web strategists, aims to press the Republican Party to make the Internet its top priority for the next four years.

Conservatives best known for blogging make up the group, including Erick Erickson, managing editor of RedState.com, and others who have worked in the field, such as Patrick Ruffini, President Bush’s 2004 campaign Web master, and Mindy Finn, the director of online strategies for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R) 2008 White House bid.

The group is specifically calling for the party to get the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of 5 million activists into its online database, raise at least $100,000 online for candidates in each of the GOP’s targeted House races in 2010, and field credible candidates in all 435 congressional districts.

The bloggers also hope to influence the selection of the next Republican National Committee chairman. The group is not working for any particular candidate yet, but Finn said it could get involved as next month’s vote on the chairman approaches.

“If it comes down to old guard versus new guard, then we’ll go for the new guard,” Finn said.

We first blogged about Rebuild The Party’s efforts here.