The GOP Stampede

Next week, the Republican Party's ground game will be out in full force. Bush strategist Karl Rove will unveil his "72-hour plan" to knock on the door of every last uncommitted voter in America leading up to the election. The strategy for the stretch-drive is unambiguous: red meat for the base, inclusiveness and security for the swing voters and making a mockery of Sen. Kerry. To get there, conservative leadership will mobilize their network of grassroots activists like never before, focusing on key battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri.

Commenting on the push, Arizona GOP chairman Bob Fannin told CNN this August that he hadn't seen anything like it in 40 years of Republican politics. "It's coordinated from the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney campaign in a very, very aggressive way. ... We are right on top of it every week."

The drive to get out the Republican vote will be but one part of a genuine and dangerously effective conservative mass movement that has emerged in recent years. But there's a difference between the right's activism and that of the left. While most progressive movements tend to be organized spontaneously by activists in true bottom-up fashion, the right's grassroots are top-down, disciplined and hierarchical. Many of their ground troops have been professionally inflamed to the point that they've become another powerful media tool for conservative leadership. Beyond a base of dedicated activists within the evangelical community and some other true believers – an estimated 15 million of whom made it to the polls for Bush in 2000 – the right's populism is often a smoke-and-mirrors affair cultivated by GOP operatives, spread with today's easy activist tools and underwritten – sometimes indirectly – by the usual conservative donors.

This approach works. We saw it performed perfectly in Florida in the days after the contested 2000 presidential vote. Pro-Bush protesters marching in the streets of Florida convinced the Miami-Dade canvassing board to shut down its recount before the tally was completed, sending Gore v. Bush to the courts. According to the New York Times, the decision to halt the recount "followed a rapid campaign of public pressure." Republican telephone banks urged voters of all stripes to protest the process and conservative talk-radio hosts echoed the call. According to the Times, one Republican attorney used a bull horn to egg the crowds on, and the gathering protesters became violent, at one point even assaulting a Democratic board member.

Where natural passions seemed inadequate in the Florida mess, an image of popular protest was manufactured by the GOP. The truth would emerge, but only after the first impression of popular unrest had been made. As the Wall Street Journal would report several days later, "Some of the unruly pro-Bush demonstrators who kicked doors and banged on windows of [the] Miami-Dade County election office last week were Capitol Hill aides whose travel expenses are being paid by the Bush campaign." They included staffers of House Majority Leader Tom Delay and Trent Lott. In one photo of a crowd of "angry voters" can be seen an equally angry John Bolton, who became Bush's neoconservative undersecretary of state for arms control. While the media eventually picked up on the artifice, the GOP had successfully constructed the charge – widely repeated – that Vice President Gore was challenging the democratic will of the majority. That's an important point. The emergence of a right wing "grassroots" movement has coincided with the rise of a conservative media that amplifies and reinforces its message.

After all, it may be difficult to spur people to mass action based on the "old right's" promises of deregulation and privatization, but as long as there's a wide belief that the left – with its "activist judges" and positive stances toward women's reproductive rights and same-sex marriage – is trying to destroy America, an increasing number of hard-working folks will be willing to hit the streets – or at least shoot off an angry e-mail to the latest target of conservative anger.