On a few occasions over the past couple of weeks, I have mentioned an initiative with respect to going on the attack against John McCain. With that, I have created a Google Group called "Know Your McCain" and we are looking to gather information (old and new), create viral videos, write blog posts and use social networking to spread the message about how dangerous John McCain is.
You can look for diaries with the tag "Know Your McCain", and some diaries will have the "Know Your McCain" in the title as well. If you are interested in joining the Google Group or helping out with the Facebook group, please send me an email (address is in my profile).
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It is one thing to be passing around information in the progressive blogosphere about McCain (both past and present), as well as using Digg to rate up posts – both of which are excellent. However, in order to really move beyond this echo chamber and reach more people, we should be thinking of how to reach others.
As such, there are two things that I want to talk about now, both of which are pretty simple but could potentially go a long way. And both involve a small amount of time investment which could pay nice dividends down the road – monitoring the corporate media sites and using the comments section, and using social networking (I’ll talk about Facebook here but it applies elsewhere too).
Monitoring Corporate Media Sites
This serves two main purposes, and the goal here is to fill the comments sections with links and facts about McCain – even if remotely relevant to the article and even if the article is about Obama. The author of the post will likely read the comments, and since we can provide handy dandy links to information about McCain, the author/reporter won’t need to do much homework. If enough stories that are unfavorable to McCain are either rated up (like on Yahoo News for example), or enough comments provide the true narrative on McCain, then maybe some of these stories that we are repeating around here will get picked up.
The other benefit here is for the readers – many readers of these stories who also read the comments sections will then see links to YouTube videos, reports on McCain’s latest outburst, links and commentary on his latest lies (with support to the lie) or whatever other narrative we can provide.
As far as what sites we should be monitoring, I can think of a few right off the top:
- New York Times;
- Washington Post;
- Yahoo News;
- Google News;
- CNN.com;
- MSNBC.com;
- ABC News;
- CBS News;
- USA Today;
- Boston Globe;
- LA Times
I am sure there are many more, but these should be a good start. And here is where I am going to ask for a small investment of time: everyone that reads a good McCain diary here or elsewhere should feel free to paste portions, links to sources or commentary on any one of these (or other) sites and stories – every day if possible.
The themes should be repeated over and over and over with each post. While there are many themes, here are a few easy ones:
- He is out of touch
- He votes with Bush over 90% of the time since 2001
- He is angry and unstable
- He lies
- He is reckless and doesn't think before acting or talking;
- He panders for his own gain
- He is elitist
- He is hated by members of his own party
Later. Rinse. Repeat.
Social Networking
I’ll talk about Facebook here, because it is one that I am the most familiar with, and one that we already have a group called "Know Your McCain" set up. I urge everyone to join, post and invite any friends that can either spread the word themselves or may "benefit" from finding out the truth about McCain that they are not going to find out elsewhere.
We plan on using this more in the coming weeks in terms of sending out daily messages to the group’s members from the diaries, YouTube videos, etc. and also utilizing the same general themes that we want to hammer home.
There are already around 120 members of the Facebook group, and that is with little to no exposure – I would love to see it grow to 500 or more over the next few weeks, and use this to help make themes viral as well.
We also have a Google group that is focusing on "Digging" up posts, coordinating and housing resources about McCain, taking videos from McCain’s "town hall" meetings in order to create video mashups and crafting diaries about McCain. Anyone that wants to be a part of that should let me know as well.
Bashing McCain is fun, and it certainly serves a purpose here in the progressive blogosphere. However, unless we are all spreading the information that we read here far and wide, we are preaching to the choir. I think that these two initiatives that I mention above (as well as a number of others that I didn’t mention) could really help a lot in reaching "the masses".
I hope you do too.