Political Grapevine
For Anthony Manetta, the epiphany came while he was working on bank ledgers.
An accounting major at Dowling College, he also worked at WSD Tax & Accounting in Lindenhurst and planned on eventually becoming a certified public accountant.
The career path was simple, direct - and entirely out of character.
"I was sitting there doing a bank reconciliation and thinking, 'Oh, boy. I've got to get out of here. I need something more fast paced.' "
To Manetta, that meant politics.
Two years ago, just as he was graduating college, the long-time political junkie, now 23, started lipolitics.com, designed to capture the rough-and-tumble of regional politics and give him a career outlet far removed from balance sheets and cash-flow statements.
"I had done campaigns since I was 17," he said. "I was hanging signs on poles. I became a committee member of the Suffolk County Republican Party."
lists of officials, contact information, filings, enrollment statistics, message boards, events, interviews and a newly created listing of political jobs. On a recent day, Rep. Peter King was seeking unpaid interns for his Washington and Massapequa Park offices, Sen. Hillary Clinton was advertising for a paid intern, while Sen. Charles Schumer was looking for an administrative assistant for a fundraising office.
While much of the content involves reprinting news stories from Newsday and many Long Island local weeklies as well as original politician profiles, party insiders as well as reporters, often turn to the message boards.
One political operative, who asked to remain nameless, said the boards are a font of rumors and gossip, much of it unsubstantiated.
At times, when the rumor mill is working overtime, politicians will post messages to deflate speculation or defend themselves.
Manetta calls Long Island politics "a world of its own."
He said that visitors from other states who get a taste of the political scene are startled by the funding levels, the mud-slinging and "strange cross-endorsement deals between different political parties."
The message boards are hosted by Marty Schwartz, whose Schwartz Report is a promotional partner of lipolitics.com. Schwartz, a former Democratic Party leader in Massapequa Park, also provides leftward political ballast to balance Manetta's Republican leanings.
In any event, political labels have a way of getting lost in the heat of the moment, Manetta said.
"I've been called everything from a Democratic shill to a Suozzi [as in Democratic Nassau County Executive Tom] plant," he said. "I can't tell you how many titles people have given me."
Despite the epithets, Manetta remains firmly planted in the Republican camp and is seeking to use lipolitics.com, which remains in the red, to promote his paying job as a political consultant.
His big break came when "one day I got a call and got a chance to be campaign manager for a Joe Finley," Manetta said. Finley, a New York City firefighter, ran a shoestring campaign for the second-district congressional seat in 2002 and was trounced by incumbent Democratic Rep. Steve Israel. Manetta said he also served as Web strategy advisor to Ed Romaine, who lost to incoming Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, and Brookhaven Town Supervisor John J. LaValle.
Manetta promotes his political consulting business through links on the home page of lipolitics.com to electionvictory.com, the Internet unit of his Roosevelt Strategy Group.
Roosevelt Strategy Group offers Web site design and hosting, media-buying services and online fundraising tools for Republican candidates, political organizations, not-for-profits and small businesses.
Manetta said the success of Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean has focused attention on online fundraising. Dean, part of the splintered Democratic field, has surged to the lead in the key metric of raising cash and reportedly has said he plans to match President Bush's goal of raising $200 million during the primary season.
"Howard Dean took advantage of something that a lot of politicians don't realize - the power of the Internet and grassroots organizations," Manetta said. "The same thing with [Republican Senator] John McCain. In 24 hours, he raised over $1 million on the Internet. It's an e-mail program. It's getting into the press. It's promoting your Web site properly. It's viral marketing."
Manetta said Dean backers would convene online and designated leaders would set up in-person meetings.
"They took it from an online meeting and put it into real life," he said.
Though Dean's campaign has played out on a national stage, Manetta said you could "shrink it down to the state Senate level or the county board level."
What are the economics of lipolitics.com, itself?
Manetta said that the site gets more than 3,000 hits a day and it's the top listing on search engine Google for those who seek "Long Island politics."
But the costs of maintaining a site "just keep mounting up" and he said his goal for 2004, a presidential election year, is to stabilize the economics of lipolitics.com.
One option, he said, is to make it a non-for-profit site and seek grants. More likely, he said, will be to turn lipolitics.com into a paid site.
"Subscribers would be politicians, staff members, media and political junkies," he said. "It could really go places."
