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The political market is structured such that the real money in political consulting goes to the specialists. If you focus on TV ads, or mail, or phones, or whatever, you make lots of money. If- like me- you don't like that kind of politics and/or are bored by specialization, you stay poor as a general consultant.
The thing is, though, it is diversification of tactics- having a lot of different tools in your tool box- that makes far winning campaigns.
This S-CHIP fight is a classic example, and as Matt wrote here, it is working. Blogs are getting their readers to call, we're paying for calls, and we're doing print ads. In the Bush Dogs campaign, we're profiling politicians, talking about Google ads, and discussing primary challenges. On the potential war with Iran, we are building a drumbeat on the blogs, getting politicians to take clear stands, and just this morning, the issue advocacy group I chair, American Family Voices, is going up with paid phone calls on the issue into targeted districts.
We obviously aren't always successful, but it is exciting to me as an old political campaigner to see the energy and creativity in the progressive movement right now: protest marches, TV and radio and newspaper and blog ads, phone call drives, Google ads, blogging, YouTube video, door-knocking campaigns. It is exciting to see all this happening, and it's important to keep being creative.
I often get asked by people whether a given tactic, be it Google ads or robocalls or TV ads or YouTube videos or whatever, is effective. My answer is that doing a single thing is almost never effective all by itself, but building a larger campaign with a lot of different ways to deliver your message frequently is. This is the kind of progressive movement we should be building- one that is aggressively trying a wide range of tactics, and is always willing to experiment with different ways of driving our messages home.
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