A Mighty River Where New Media Rulz

Tonight it the first night of the emergence of the Next Generation of GOP leadership.

Regardless of tonight's outcomes for Republicans, with all the retirements (and a few indictments), large numbers of the GOP elect are leaving politics. Many are leaving voluntary, some not so much (tossed out kicking and screaming by the voters, IOW).

This has created a leadership vacuum that the GOP must immediately confront and master, or risk being out of the running in national and local races for many years to come.

The political reality is that, starting tonight, the Old Boys Club that has dominated the GOP since Speaker Gingrich's retirement will be slowly replaced by a New Generation of Republican. A different kind of Republican.

However, the "Big News" is that many of these new leaders will have never run for office, will have never worked the Party hierarchy, will owe little or nothing to Big Donors and/or Special Interests.

Where are these New Leaders coming from?

New Media. Talk-radio, the Blogs, and the online presences of the Dead Trees Media.

Rush, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, and the legions of local Right-Wing talkers will combine their substantial voices with the elite of the Blogs, such as Townhall.com, RealClearPolitics.com, The Corner, et al.

The Internet will become a rushing stream, a mighty river of voices, opinions, discussions and analysis that will have a profound impact on the GOP.

These voices will bubble up from; FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, and the many thousands of other Internet self-publishing spaces.

These tiny streams of personal thought and opinion will become the "Mighty River" that will sweep aside the Old School donor preferences and lobbying networks that have proven to be such a drag on the GOP.

Over time, this will transform the GOP as nothing else has since WFB wrote "God and Man at Yale" and started publishing the National Review.

This transformative impulse will NOT be led by long-serving elected representatives, they will increasingly become either the willing partners of this transformation, or they will be cast aside by it.

Hugh, Sean, Mark, Dennis, and of course, The Maha Rushie will become the Chosen Representatives of the Republican and Conservative activists and voters. Their unrestricted and unqualified, open access to the many voices of the American electorate, their reach into millions and millions of non-elite (average) American households will provide the reach that the GOP will need to bring over the largest bloc of the national voting electorate - The Independent/Undecided voters.

These I/U voters have grown up in the New Media world. They are comfortable with MySpace and YouTube, they get most of their music from iTunes, and regard Compact Discs as DinosaurTech and 12" vinyl as Primeval. Broadcast television is the QuaintTech of their parents.

"Appointment TV" is when THEY chose to watch a favorite broadcast show on their iPhone or iPod. They have never owned or seen a typewriter. They have never seen and can't comprehend a world without MacOS or Windows, and regard ubiquitous and 24/7 access to the Internet via broadband technologies as a birthright. Many currently don't have wired landline telephones, and thousands and thousands more are joining them everyday.

Barrack Obama's Campaign has taken the New Media sensibility of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, amplified it a hundredfold. Obama has provided the New Media meme that ALL politicians will have to master, or they will left behind just as surely as the Wobblies and the Populists joined the Whigs and the Tories in the musty pages of U.S. history.

Tomorrow the GOP will have to face this New Reality and the only choice they will have is to master it.

March or Die Time...

...to turn a phrase, "Meet the New Boss, Different Than the Old Boss"