Grassroots vs astroturf
Subvert the Bush campaign's letter to the editor spam scam.
The revamped Bush campaign site has a page where you can send a letter to the editor of your local paper. It includes a number of stock paragraphs that you can insert into your letter with a simple mouse click. Already, a number of identikit letters have cropped up.
Atrios talks today about the liberal counter-offensive: use the Bush team’s infrastructure to send your own messages about the state of the economy.
Notgenuises notably recommend a) that you write your own letter, not just copy the official Bush lines, and b) that you don’t spam all the newspapers in your region, just send to one of them.
This is the difference between a real grassroots campaign and Bush’s fake astroturf one. I know which one I prefer.