Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Sleeping Giant

What happened in Massachusetts will be repeated around this country and here is why. It all started with the presidential campaign in 2008. The “yes we can” slogan that Barack Obama used worked well. What he was able to do was get a grassroots ground swell of voters to identify with him and each other.

So how does that extrapolate to the special election in Massachusetts? It is people identifying with each other. There was a women at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania that said to Arlen Spector, you have awoken a giant.” She was right.
Sarah Palin had an effect as well as talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh and opinion based TV shows like Glenn Becks’. But what happened in Massachusetts was a result of the beginning of the effect this giant is going to have on American politics. This giant was there during the election but not quit galvanized come November. My wife and I attended the 9/12 rally in DC. The number of people there was just fantastic. You can read about our experience here, The DC Rally From The Ground. What that rally did, for those who attended and those who wish they could of, helped millions of people identify with each other. Just like the people that believed in “yes we can” and “hope and change.” In DC it was “can you hear us now” as well as when Scott Brown was elected.
In the run up to the special election in Massachusetts the interest from across the country was amazing. Scott Brown has Al Gore to thank in part for his victory because the internet is where most of this grassroots support came from and this is where this victory by this giant will repeat itself over and over again across this country.

This is how it works. You are reading my opinion on the internet via my blog. You don’t have to meet me, you don’t have to know who I am, and you don’t have to read a letter to the editor, if the editor decides to publish my opinion so you can read it. You can sit where ever you are and read my opinion along with that of many others. You can pass this along, you can start a conversation with me and others in the comment section, and on and on it goes. I started this blog in part because of the last election cycle. I could see that we were headed for trouble if Barack Obama could win. There were many other blogs that started in 2008 as well. Some of these blogs have grown tremendously since the election. Some had been around and were just discovered in mass like Freerepublic.com and social network sites like facebook. These are the vehicle that helped people “identify” with each other.

If you are a conservative in Massachusetts you are qualified to be put on an endangered species list. But yet Scott Brown won. The blogs and other internet chat rooms were filled with people all with the same view and a feeling that “yes we can.” Someone could type something in on a blog like Citizen Wells and it would go viral in a matter of seconds. Finally you realized that you weren’t on an endangered species list. That there are people out there that fell like you do, and lots of them. This is why what happened in Massachusetts will be repeated over and over again.

This is a revolution.