ABSTRACT
On February 4, 2014, in the run-up to that year's midterm elections, national Republicans were handed a "gift" in the form of a Congressional Budget Office report that undermined one of their biggest arguments about the Affordable Care Act. As in the beginning of the Republican era, when Richard Nixon reinvented himself without changing anything but his image, television proved an ideal medium for communicating a simple but misleading message. As with primitive television and radio, conservatives were among the first movers who understood the Internet's networking potential. During the early days of the political Internet, the right was ahead of the left in traffic, and the top weblogs were conservative. Integration of the Internet into the right's centralized messaging model was particularly destructive to its community blogs. Conservatives have money in abundance and have taken advantage of unrestricted spending opportunities to counteract the effects of the changing media landscape.
