Republicans steal Barack Obama's internet campaigning tricks

Since their election disaster, the right has used new media to gather strength, culminating in last weekend's huge protest

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 September 2009 20.00 BST
• Article history

The 9/12 march last Saturday highlighted the strength of anger felt by many conservatives at Obama's reforms. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Erik Telford remembers all too vividly the dark cloud hanging over him on 5 November 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. For the internet strategist at the rightwing campaign group Americans for Prosperity, election night was a double disaster. Not only had Obama won the votes, he had outwitted his Republican opponents in his use of new media tricks such as email recruiting and social networking.

"The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary," Telford says.

That cloud hung over the conservative movement for many weeks. A sense of crisis set in, he recalls, with bloggers, strategists and Republican politicians scrambling in different directions.

"There was a real lack of leadership, a lot of confusion."

But then, almost imperceptibly, something started to happen. Telford noticed Google groups popping up, listserves on which people would send angry emails back and forth. The anger was stimulated by Obama's $800bn stimulus package that was introduced five days into his presidency.

With very little leadership, the Google groups began to co-ordinate their response. People took on the onerous job of poring over the bill's hundreds of pages of small print in search of wasteful spending, following the Wikipedia model of crowd-sourcing.

They began to uncover items that looked suspicious or ridiculous: electric golf carts, snow machines, a crime museum in Las Vegas. They passed the examples on to mainstream media outlets, notably the new face of the right, snake-tongued Glenn Beck of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, who used it as ammunition to attack the young administration. The anger grew. When Americans for Prosperity put up its own petition against the bill on its website, it had 500,000 signatures within days.

"It was a huge wake-up call to all of us," Telford says. "On the right, people had known new media was important but they were still hesitant about it. After the stimulus experience, no one was left in any doubt about its power."

Less than eight months later, the seed planted in those anti-Obama Google groups has burst into flower on the streets of Washington. Tens – or even perhaps hundreds – of thousands of livid demonstrators filled the capital, brandishing banners saying "Don't tread on me!" and "Obamunism" – a reference to the president's perceived socialist or even communist tendencies. "Liar! Liar!"they shouted, echoing the outburst of a Republican congressman to Obama's face last week.

The noise of that startling crowd could be heard rumbling on throughout this week. Democrats rushed to dismiss the display of rightwing force as the work of mavericks and extremists. Jimmy Carter upped the ante by suggesting the vitriol was racist: many people in America, he said, believed a black man should not be president.

For Telford, though, dismissing the eruption as extremist or racist was to miss the point. For him, the 9/12 rally marked the moment at which conservative America finally embraced the new world and recovered its confidence. He believes the movement is now close to catching up with the Democrats in terms of internet savviness; in some ways he contends it has even surpassed them, particularly on Twitter, where much of the heavy lifting behind the so-called "tea parties" against Obama's tax and other policies is being done.

Matt Kibbe, who heads FreedomWorks, a national conservative group that led the push behind last Saturday's rally, goes further. He says that the movement has stolen from Obama the techniques he used to such effect last year and is now redeploying them as a stick with which to beat the president.

When Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, FreedomWorks studied how he did it and then copied him. They set up a ning site, a Facebook-like platform that allows members to talk to each other without having to go through the parent body. The result was explosive.

FreedomWorks now has more than 800,000 members who largely organise and fund themselves; all the group itself does is arrange permits for demonstrations and advise on logistics.

The phenomenon has steadily built in scale and force, starting with the first tea party protest on 27 February, then a nationwide tea party against taxes championed by Fox News on 15 April and on to the summer's town hall meetings and last Saturday's rally against Obama's healthcare reforms.

A plethora of groups have jumped on board, with exotic names such as Tea Party Patriots, Grassfire, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, 60 plus, all loosely working together, with FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity probably the leading partners.

Both groups are proud of their internet-fuelled achievements over the past few months. But there is another, more traditional, layer to their work which they are less prone to brag about — the powerful individuals and corporations that bankroll them.

FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity are sister groups who came from the same parent body — a campaign called Citizens for Sound Economy, which split in two in 2004. It was set up by one of America's richest men, David Koch, an oil tycoon who has funded rightwing causes for decades.

FreedomWorks receives funding from the tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris, as well as from Richard Scaife, another business tycoon, who for years helped fund dirt-digging investigations into Bill Clinton. Local branches of Americans for Prosperity have also received tobacco money; the group has opposed smoke-free workplace laws and cigarette taxes.

In the environmental area, too, there has been an affinity between the groups and the corporate interests that back them. ExxonMobil was a sponsor of Citizens for Sound Economy, and both FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have campaigned vigorously against Obama's plans to reduce CO₂ emissions through a cap and trade scheme, working closely with the American Petroleum Institute.

"This is same old, same old," says John Stauber of the Centre for Media and Democracy, which investigates corporate lobbying. "Yes there are some new names and new causes, but these anti-government front groups have been around for a long time."

The question is: what do the newly emboldened rightwing incubators want? Are they merely concerned with specific objectives such as stopping health reform and cap and trade, or is there a larger, more sinister motive?

Liberal critics such as Chris Harris of the monitoring campaign MediaMatters have no doubts. "Legally, groups like FreedomWorks cannot say they are out to unseat Obama. But there's no question that their aim is to topple the president."

FreedomWorks insists that about four-fifths of its $8m budget this year comes from small individual donations. Kibbe interprets that as a sign of genuine pent-up anger towards spendthrift politicians in Washington of both parties, and believes it can be traced back to George Bush's bailout of the banks.

He admits that the self-propelled uprising has allowed some extremists to join the crowd, but says that groups like his are now trying to devise ways to silence the most egregious ones. "When you have thousands of people gathering in one space, you are always going to have a few nutty people show up."

Just how far the movement can go to lift the Republican party out of its doldrums and re-energise it in Congress will become clear next year with the first major electoral test of the Obama presidency: the mid-term elections. According to Peter Brown, a pollster at Quinnipiac University, Republicans tend to turn out in higher numbers in off-year elections, which makes the tea parties highly relevant. "Enthusiasm matters: the more angry people are, the more likely they are to vote. All this activism and demonstrating is not necessarily the end for Obama, but it's certainly not good news."

The historical parallel on everybody's mind is 1994, when Clinton's young presidency was bloodied by Republicans taking over the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. It is perhaps no coincidence that the most popular conservative on Twitter, with almost a million followers, is Newt Gingrich, architect of that same revolution.

All of which makes Kibbe think that those Democrats who try to pigeonhole the tea parties as a crank phenomenon are playing into the anti-Obama movement's hands. "The Democrats who want to marginalise this movement are making a big mistake. They are insulting the people who they should be courting, and every time they do that our numbers seem to double in size."