Frank Strategies: The Blog

As I draft this inaugural blog post, America stands at an extremely challenging crossroads.

Homeowners continue to watch the values of their single greatest assets plummet.  The majority of American households that have money invested in stock markets has seen the value of their retirement accounts and portfolios drop by roughly half in less than a year.  Unemployment is rising sharply, with more people losing their jobs last month than at any other time since 1974.  And if that weren’t bad enough, entire industries are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy or insolvency.  In short, we are facing the greatest economic challenge in at least three decades, perhaps longer.

At the same time, our public school system is largely broken and unaccountable, which is dooming yet another generation of American kids to mediocrity in the competitive global marketplace.  Our dependence on foreign sources of oil continues to threaten not only our economic security, but also our national security.  The same kind of uncompetitive, outdated and bankruptcy-inducing union model that has crippled Detroit is about to be foisted upon many more American businesses by taking the secret ballot away from rank-and-file workers in union elections.

And on top of all of that, there’s a ticking demographic time bomb that promises trillions of dollars in entitlement benefits to millions of Americans who really don’t need a check from the taxpayers.

The big question facing our nation right now is how we deal with this mess.

Well, despite all the inside-the-Beltway punditry about this supposedly “post-partisan,” “post-ideological,” “pragmatic,” “centrist” era, the fact is there are still essentially two schools of thought about where we should go from here.

One on side are collectivists who think we need a dramatic expansion of government control over the economy to address these challenges.  That we need a so-called “New New Deal” that will redistribute billions, perhaps trillions, of taxpayer dollars from the so-called “wealthy” to create new government jobs – building new bridges and highways and windmills and the like.  That we need significant government expansion into the health care sector.  More taxpayer money for — and government control over — essentially the existing public school system.  That the government should force a costly transition from fossil-based fuels to alternative (and in many cases currently unviable and untested) energy sources – even if that means a significant hit to the economy.

And on the other side stand those who think that for capitalism to work, there need to be consequences to bad decisions – not an endless series of taxpayer-funded bailouts.  That the best way to improve the economic security of the greatest number of people for the longest period of time is for the government planners to largely get out of the way of the private-sector entrepreneurs who start and expand new small businesses, create good new jobs and actually make the national economic pie larger as opposed to just redistributing pieces of a same-sized pie.  That we need to let private entrepreneurs develop all kinds of new domestic energy sources – including oil, natural gas, shale, clean coal and nuclear power – and that the government shouldn’t subsidize winners and losers based largely on how politically correct or politically connected they are.  And that we need to get control of entitlement spending before it completely bankrupts this nation.

If you haven’t already guessed, I fall squarely in the latter camp.

One of my goals with this blog is to contribute to the national debate on these issues – not so much by airing my own two-bit opinions about each day’s developments (although there will be some of that, to be sure,) but by actually adding new, politically relevant, newsworthy information to the debate.

On a related note, there’s been much written this year about how far behind the Right is when it comes to online activism, and much of what’s been written is absolutely correct.  My personal belief, which is not necessarily original to me nor exclusively mine, is that the right side of the blogosphere has been far too focused on personal punditry and simply linking to the opinions of other like-minded bloggers in a virtual echo chamber, and that we instead need to become more engaged in actual activism and investigative journalism.

Which brings me to my other major goal for this blog: to highlight best practices in the world of online political activism and marketing – both on the left and the right.

On that front, I’ll say upfront that while there’s no shortage of new online tools that can educate, energize and mobilize the grassroots, I personally believe that the single best online tool is one that may seem archaic to some hardcore online aficionados: video.  That’s obviously not to say that Twitter, Facebook, or the many other online networking tools are without merit.  But the fact is the vast majority of existing and potential conservative activists and voters simply don’t have the technological skill or interest (not to mention the time) to use all of these sites for effective political mobilization. 

But just about anybody can and will click “Play” on an online video that’s embedded on their favorite blog or news site.  And I’m convinced that many of those folks can be trained to use their home camcorders or even their point-and-shoot digital cameras to create videos that expose their local elected officials’ hypocrisy, stupidity or corruption to the world. Or at least to the mainstream media and voters in their local communities, which can cumulatively have a powerful impact on the nation as a whole.

The road ahead is unclear and likely to be very challenging for many of us.  Likewise, I’m not sure exactly where this blog will go, but I intend to make it a blog about politics, online marketing, and occasionally the intersection of the two.  And sometimes about neither politics nor marketing nor anything too serious whatsoever.  Because in these trying times sometimes we just need to see a crazy-ass cat engage in a death match against an HP Laser Jet printer.