There was a great column by Shane Goldmacher in yesterday’s edition of Capitol Weekly. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, you should. I am biased though, because it prominently features this website, and talks about the influence that it is having on California politics!
Also prominently mentioned are the efforts of my long time friend, Steve Frank. Like me, Steve is a former President of the California Republican Assembly (though he is OLD, so his Presidency was like around Lincoln’s time, or something like that). In all seriousness, Steve and I were on the phone joking about the ‘Rise of the Jewish Right’ — pretty funny!
Here is the beginning of the article, with a link to the rest at the bottom:
The rise of the blogs: How the GOP uses the Web to organize
staff before a packed press conference, Jon Fleischman’s phone rang.
It was Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"It took me about half the call to get my sea legs," recalls Fleischman,
who served as executive director of the Republican Party from 1999 to 2001,
and is currently the publisher of the FlashReport, one of the state’s
newest, and most influential conservative blogs.
The two spoke for about ten minutes, as Fleischman listened, and then
expressed his concerns about Schwarzenegger’s choice of one-time Democratic
operative Susan Kennedy as his top gubernatorial staffer.
Then, fifteen minutes later, and still thirty minutes before the scheduled
press conference, Fleischman posted an account of the conversation online.
It featured all the governor’s talking points on Kennedy: That she "will be
100 percent on board with his agenda," had "presence in meetings," was
"organized" and could "prepare cogent briefings."
The governor had used the call to beat the news cycle–and to reach out
midday to the thousands of conservative readers that visit Fleischman’s site
daily.
It was one more sign that political blogs–and the FlashReport in
particular–are coming of age in California.
Link the the full article here.
Oh yes, the writer of this piece, Shane Goldmacher, has his own website on California politics, which always has interesting morsels of news. Read that here.