New Media Help Conservatives Get Their Anti-Obama Message Out

In November, the morning after Election Day, a conservative blogger in Georgia blasted an e-mail to 65,000 people.

Erick Erickson’s 5 a.m. “Morning Briefing” seemed counterintuitive — the election of a Democrat to a U.S. House seat in Upstate New York held by Republicans for more than a century, he wrote, was “a huge win for conservatives.”

Yet the missive immediately was posted online by the conservative publication Human Events, a corporate sibling of Erickson’s blog, RedState. It next reached the Web site of the American Spectator magazine, whose publisher, Alfred S. Regnery, sits on the board of the conservative publishing house that owns RedState and Human Events.

Ricocheting inside the Beltway, Erickson’s analysis fueled discussion later that morning at two influential weekly meetings of D.C. conservatives. Next, it was endorsed by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, considered by many conservatives the ultimate authority. “We kept a horrible Republican from possibly winning,” Limbaugh said.

The ability of a single e-mail to shape a message illustrates the power of the conservative network — loosely affiliated blogs, radio hosts, “tea-party” organizers and D.C. institutions that are binding together to fuel opposition to President Obama and, sometimes, to Republicans.

Read More:     By Jerry Markon, Washington Post