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Eye on the House

Posted by David on February 20th, 2007

In the Republican + tech sphere, there’s an emerging bright spot which is worth noting in this space.

House Republicans, led by Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Chief Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor have been doing some pretty neat things which gives us hope of more to come.

We’ll start with Blunt.

Last week, Blunt started a Youtube channel, with little fanfare and one small Politico mention.

Then on Friday, Congressman Sam Johnson (R-Texas) gave a powerful speech on the floor of the House regarding Iraq. Johnson, a former POW, argued on the floor of the House to support our troops. As expected, the mainstream media barely covered the speech, though it was quite powerful. Note: Anytime Johnson speaks on the House floor about war, people listen.

Congressman Blunt’s media office recognized the importance of the speech and took action. They recorded the speech and uploaded it to YouTube.

By Saturday at noon, it had been viewed a mere 64 times. Then, several conservative blogs started linking to it, and it quickly jumped to 800. Then it exploded, within an hour it jumped to 2,000 views. By noon the next day - only 24 hours later - his speech had been viewed over 8,500 times.

Today, the video has been viewed 33,147 times, has 164 user ratings, 57 comments, and has been favorited 78 times. The speech is 00:06:47 - no short video by YouTube standards.

Because of Blunt’s efforts, conservative bloggers had the content they needed to fight back in the Iraq Resolution debate. Message sent.

Blunt and his team have clearly been taking the advice of Robert Bluey.

On to Cantor.

Cantor recently picked up former RNC eCampaign Director Patrick Ruffini’s deputy, Matt Lira, for his modern media shop. Cantor, one of the House’s best communicators, chose wisely and Matt’s efforts and talents in the modern world are already paying off.

Last week, Team Cantor released a web video to help push-back on the Iraq Resolution debate which you can view on his homepage by clicking on “Historic Debate.”

Lira chose to actually create his own embeddable player using flash, which, at the time, I saw as a mistake. I said that for the sake of bandwidth and utility - simply upload the message to YouTube and let it spread organically.

He responded with code for me (and other conservative bloggers) to embed to our blogs:

The code still creates a problem of utility, but Cantor’s name is branded in the player which helps him personally and politically.

The content is solid, and helped the Republicans bypass the mainstream media and communicate directly with the grassroots. My hope is that next time they’ll ditch the embeddable player and find that utility and community (which YouTube provides) outweighs personal branding.

Good work Cantor and Blunt. You deserve extra porridge.

Progress. Slowly, but surely.

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