When it comes to winning in November, is a good idea about to be destroyed, not just by the Republicans’ awesome knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but also by an utter inability to design a good website and effectively promote it?
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In my search for interesting videos to share with you in our new “Watch” section, which has American Thinker podcasts and recommended videos, I stumbled across a video of Newt Gingrich explaining that he thinks Speaker Mike Johnson’s “Contrast for America” can be every bit as successful as Gingrich’s own 1994 “Contract with America.”
What’s on the credit side of the Contrast for America is that the Democrats are daily revealing themselves to be pretty awful. As I would put it, they are communists, Islam-adjacent, and disconnected from reality.
In other words, in many ways, Democrats should be making it easy for us this November. The problem is what Gingrich identifies as the other half of the equation: To make the Contrast for America work, he says that Republicans have to be courageous and smart.
I choked on my drink when I read that. “Courageous” is almost never paired with Republicans. And while individual Republicans are smart (if only because they’re neither communists, nor Islamists, nor crazy people), the Republican collective’s campaign savvy can be disheartening, to say the least.
But there’s one other problem that Newt did not identify—and that’s the job of making Americans aware of the Contrast for America.
In 1994, there were three major network news shows (ABC, NBC, and CBS), plus CNN. Fox News wasn’t even a twinkle in Rupert Murdoch’s eye, for it launched only in October 1996.
There were myriad local newspapers (with the NY Times and WaPo sold across America), along with global news agencies such as Reuters and the AP. Time and Newsweek provided weekly summaries for a mostly middle-class audience. And for the “intelligentsia,” there were PBS and NPR.
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Broadly speaking, that was the national information universe.
What was also different in 1994 is that these news outlets, although generally left-leaning, did make some effort to report most of the major news. They had to, because in a pre-internet age, there wasn’t a nonstop flow of constantly updated information to pick and choose from. Far fewer outlets and far less content competed for attention. Reporting was slower, and stories could be more in-depth.
As a result, everyone knew about Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America. The media hated it and disparaged it, but they reported on it. That at least allowed American voters to choose.
Things are different nowadays. How many of you know about the Contrast for America? I’m incredibly well connected to the news, but I hadn’t heard of it until I watched that video. It just hadn’t intersected with the many news sources I read daily (and constantly).
It is something all of us should be talking up, but there’s a problem: The website is terrible. The single-page format is very poorly done. First, I absolutely hate black backgrounds with white text (very hard on my eyes). Second, speaking of hard on the eyes, all the information on it is tiny. The website has a poor flow and is illogical. It has a high school feel, with no help from the inevitable tech-savvy geeks (and future millionaires) who exist at every American high school. This will not go viral.
I hate seeing a smart concept brought down by poor technology and implementation. You’d think that someone would have said, “Hey, Elon, we need help. You’re a design guy (look at how elegant Teslas are). Can you find someone to make a website for us that’s modern enough to attract young people, and visually friendly enough for the oldsters?” But it seems that nobody asked.
If I could, I’d go up to Speaker Johnson and say, “Stop having some House intern design a website that could be the difference between winning and losing an incredibly important election. Buy fewer flowers for the Republican headquarters, call Elon Musk, and get a good web designer to do the job.”
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