GOP gets its tech on
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We won’t enunciate all of them here; the blessed loyal readers of this blog among you know what they are. But one of the biggest GOP misreadings of the American electorate in 2012 was an inability to appreciate and capitalize on the power of social media and digital technology, and its vast reach into segments of the population the Republican Party needs like a drowning man needs a lifeguard.
This week we got an indicator that that’s about to change.
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Jennifer Van Grove of CNet reported on Wednesday that the Republican National Committee, the organization tasked with taking charge of how the GOP makes itself matter to the American people, has hired a former Facebook manager as its first chief technology officer. The Huffington Post also reported on the hiring on Wednesday.
Andrew Barkett, 32, a former FB engineering manager, assumes the new role “meant to provide the party with much-needed expertise in the digital realm and help it develop relationships in the tech sector,” Van Grove reported.
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THIS WAS no lucky hire who dropped out of the sky. The need for the new position was outlined in the party’s Growth & Opportunity Project manifesto and blueprint released months ago. Barkett, apparently, is the point person the GOP needs, someone “whose experience and background sends a strong and immediate signal that we are serious about growing our digital and tech operations ...”
The immediate objective: to “identity, recruit and hire a working group of data scientists, tech and digital advocates to build a structure that can eventually be deployed during the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race ...”
Van Grove reported that Barkett joined Facebook in January 2011 and took charge of engineering teams responsible for scaling FB mobile infrastructure, messaging, and its recently-redesigned News Feed component. Before Facebook, Barkett was senior director of engineering for Livescribe, a company that makes a paper-based computing platform for electronic note-taking.
Clearly, the man’s got the goods. A source with early knowledge of the hiring told HuffPost that “[t]his guy is obviously in a different mold. This guy is actually from the engineering side. If I’m looking at it from the RNC’s perspective, getting somebody who is really an engineer and has been doing this on the tech side makes a lot of sense.”
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IT’S OBVIOUSLY a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party 18 months before the midterms. The deeper question for voters will be: What’s behind it? In 2012, the Republican Party lost the messaging war, but only partly because of the messenger — the avenue of communication. More problematic, then and now, is the message itself.
And there’s something just as important as outreach to those outside the tent: finding common cause among the true believers, and ending the intraparty punch-ups that have characterized the GOP since before the election. The Republicans can’t hope to reposition themselves for the American people until they reposition themselves for themselves.
Barkett’s bona fides loudly announce themselves, and there’s every good reason to think the Republican Party will mount a more robust, less self-centered strategy in the social and digital realms next year, and in 2016. But the rubber will meet the road sooner rather than later. The only thing worse than not having a solid, full-fledged social and digital strategy is having one that doesn’t send a transformative message to the people that strategy was developed to reach.
Image credits: Barkett: Corrin Rankin for Redwood City City Council/Facebook, via CNet. Facebook logo: © 2013 Facebook.
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