I have to confess, I find it hard to talk about political communications without including Bruce Lee.
I’m an avid mentioner of movies, MTV videos and pop culture memes in lecture. It’s all about association. I can tell you something five times while smiling. But if you don’t relate it to yourself, or to a movie or picture or feeling that you deeply know? It might be meaningless rote. But if I relate it, it seeps into your being. It’s not about counting. It’s about feeling. (2)
Now you might not agree with what I’ve said, but it’s part of your own thought process now. It is part of you. As I often say, “You can dance it.” Whatever was choreographed ‘on you’ is now in ‘you.’ Like water.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3sBulXpVw&feature=youtu.be]
Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee’s water image is widely known, by warriors and politicians, artists and denizens of the corporate boardroom. It’s about a mind emptied, which can now go beyond itself - to fill others up. Taking their form, forming their shape, being quietly yet loudly powerful in doing so.
I thought of this video when I encountered the Politico piece on the Republican National Committee’s proposed structural shift: POLITICO: RNC Weighs Outsourcing List (link below post.)
The Republican National Committee is considering a proposal to hand over partial control of its most valuable asset – its voter file – to a newly formed private entity that would enhance it by using unregulated money from an increasingly influential network of independent groups allied with the GOP (1).
At first this shift may sound administrative. The RNC has debt. They need to address it. They are adding a revenue channel and outreach methods that will potentially do that. But actually it’s far different. It’s about what the political party may turn into. In not too long.
The new party? Will it be a nucleus, a center of a horizontally built social media-driven universe? A party that knows you extraordinarily well, via information you voluntarily offer to a number of organizations that you belong to and believe in? A party with several new channels by which to raise money?
**
Republicans and Democrats, circa 2011, have new leaders. Reince Priebus, RNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Democratic National Committee. Each creates intriguing and challenging attention. It’s a compliment to each. Were they on TV in classic versus, Wasserman-Schultz would dominate, I imagine. She’s a strong and eloquent voice. I seriously have the impression that Florida hurricanes do not blow this lady over.
In comparison, Priebus might look secondary. But such places have opportunities and freedoms that frontrunner spots don’t. They exist slightly under the radar and can take greater risk. He seems to be a quiet yet calculating chessplayer, a systems thinker. I wouldn’t dismiss him anytime soon.
It’s in that context that I read of Priebus’ new signature initiative. His way of getting the RNC out of debt, and moving the greater opinion needle redward. It may turn out to be a lot more than that.
**
I was enticed originally by the RNC’s debt picture being an incentive to this newly proposed program. It relates to my whole study area of unfederaling, an interdisciplinary research focus which looks at the new roles entities will assume within a decentralization -and lessening- of federal government’s influence. My initial question on this topic was, “what will the federal government consider when faced with enormous debt and deficit, that would not ever be on the table otherwise?”
The answer continuously came back to ways to shift responsibility. To change the structures in ways that tapped new resources/alliances on a peer level. In the paraphrased words of a student: they need to ‘spread outward’ what they are doing already ‘so they can still keep doing it.’
While that comment was made in regard to Congressman Paul Ryan’s proposals for Medicaid and Medicare within the Roadmap and Path to Prosperity, and their shifted reliance toward individual choice, the states and to private and philanthropic subsectors, it also applies here. I wondered if Priebus was trying to make his RNC a precursor of the hybrid political organization of the future. One decentralized and weaned of the idea of the federal, and ever more fluid in terms of the breadth and depth of its mission and brand.
Within that thought, and referring to the linked article, do DataTrust, and its siblings Catalist and Themis, seek to be that hybrid political organization of the future? A subject for a future post.
**
For now, let’s look at what Priebus is endeavoring to do. Towards understanding it in context, let’s look at the difference between a campaign and a movement.
Say, hypothetically, that I’ve recently been involved with a group of consultants who are very accustomed to campaigns. But now they are trying to start a movement. The transition from one to the other might prove more challenging than they expected. Here’s one reason why.
Movements and campaigns start for different reasons and in different places. Campaigns are centrally run, driving orders downwards. There are underlings out in the field, blessed by the above. Those underlings meet expectations dictated from above. So many letters, so many radio appearances. So many voters to the polls. They are accorded credit to the extent they remain uniform.
Movements, however, flip that model. They are by nature edge to center. They seek to influence central behavior via outside momentum, which both starts at the edge and grows there. Movements and campaigns may have similar results at times, and they may ally at times when mutually advantageous (see Obama 08.) But movements look nothing like campaigns.
Campaigns are cut and dried, monolith meet monarchy, all quite well planned beforehand. Certainty equals effectiveness. If they morph they probably fail.
Movements are flexible and morph by their very nature. Their power is in their digital social mosaic, their ability to form and shape themselves situationally. You can’t catch them, strangle them or kill them, because they are virtually everywhere.
As I see it, Priebus wants a movement-like force to grab hold of the RNC. What’s he doing about that?
He’s letting go.
**
The RNC plans to allow its lists to move outward for use and exchange, into the component parts that make up its wider constituency.
Duncan and Priebus, in their Monday presentation last week, insisted the RNC would retain tight control over the list, no matter the final contours of the deal with Data Trust, and they made the case that the types of enhancements that the trust will make to the list for free would cost the committee as much as $6 million a year to do in-house.(1)
No longer a case of an uberheadquarters keeping secrets, now power flows outward. Perhaps not to return. Delegation of into component parts. The NRA. Faith and civic based organizations, chambers and clubs of commerce, prosperity and growth. Persons, places and things which, at the local level, interweave emotional and financial member identity. And which sit outside (at the moment…) of stringent FEC reporting requirements.
It’s possible to identify emotively as a Republican. But you don’t identify with the RNC in the same way, do you? That’s always been a problem. But RNC morphing into its outer specific identities? Choreographing on them and letting them own the dance as its performer? Is creating new cycles and loci of ownership. Quite a departure from the 20th century campaign, in its topdown blitz via airwar. It’s a strategy that grows from the caucusing ground. A movement.
The Politico piece discusses concerns around this strategy.
“Once the asset is outside the four walls, they’ve lost control,” said the source, who speculated what would happen if an entity like the Tea Party Express wanted to rent the list to help the primary opponent of an incumbent Republican, or if the NRA rented it to use in support of one of its rare Democratic endorsees.(1)
Won’t a decentralization like this cripple a once strong organization? Maybe, and maybe not. I say it will strengthen it.
Yet here’s the friction point, as touched upon in the article.
Priebus insists that the spread will be wide, and will target with precision. Yet he also says that the RNC proper will maintain control from the center at all times.
He can’t have both of those things.
**
If he allows the message to grow via the edge, at the edge, he must let go.
If he tries to hold on, then the edge and the center will eventually come to odds, and that would be inefficient, not to mention embarrassing.
If power is in letting go, Priebus as chair becomes a sort of event coordinator. Not its overseer or its director. It is not only a reframing of party structure, but of what a Party Chair is about.
About what sort of personality that chair should have. The Party Chair in this new iteration cannot be a domineer. Nor one that yells.
He/she will need to be quiet, prescient, brilliant. A chessplayer. But isn’t that what Priebus is?
**
I’ve only touched the surface here. The shift, if played out, will have effect on manner and method of fundraising, of GotV efforts, of local message management. It may guide and influence the Tea Party which stands as the RNC's rebellious crafty sibling, or its rival DNC, led by Ms. Wasserman-Schultz, whom, no doubt, is watching this closely and with intelligent calculation. Her party has already dipped their toe into the water here. But not ever gone as far as is now being proposed. Will she leap over what he’s doing? Beat him to the punch?
Does she want to?
**
Both Priebus and Wasserman-Schultz want their tenures - meaning their Committees - to mean something to their members and constituents. In a way their parties haven’t lately.
But the process of such choreography is a scary one. Control is not yours to keep. Yet responsibility is.
Reince Priebus may not even realize what he could be setting off here. It could change it all. For good, for bad, or more likely some of each.
Dilution may occur, as former North Dakota GOP chairman Gary Emineth strongly inferred in his quote in this Politico piece. (1) In my own words? "What we are may float away, may seep out into everything. We may not be able to find ourselves at times, because with so many faces we won’t be in control. But we will be everywhere."
Yes, quite possible. But isn’t that the point?
To be water, my friend.
**
(1) http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55147.html#ixzz1N6M0Zf5b POLITICO: RNC weighs outsourcing list By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith May 17, 2011 04:00 PM EDT
(2) Hat tip to one of my favorite films, The Turning Point. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4143644953/ The concept captured in these words was spoken on a number of occasions by Leslie Browne in her brilliant performance as Emilia
