When I picked up America's Right Turn, a new book by Richard Viguerie and David Franke, I expected another tiresome political rant like those we've seen all to frequently this year. Instead, it's a "how-to" manual for political pros combined with a memoir of Viguerie's career.

Richard Viguerie was one of the pioneers in using direct mail for political fundraising. He describes the methods he used to secure names to add to his prized mailing list, how to write copy that motivates donors to write a check, and how to nurture this over time to build a movement. The last two chapters discuss the Internet, and online fundraising during the primary season for the 2004 presidential election. There is also a blog for the book.

The tone of the book is analytical rather than polemical. While the authors are strongly conservative, they express admiration for pioneering liberal fundraisers such as the McGovern campaign's direct mail honcho Morris Dees and Howard Dean's Internet operation.

It's curious to read that the 1950's were a time of liberal hegemony, as the book argues, since it's conventional nowadays to see the 1950's as a very conservative time. But while the public may have been viscerally conservative, conservatism as an intellectual movement was moribund until William Buckley founded National Review. The book describes the steps taken to raise money and organize a movement to the point where we may be entering a period of conservative dominance of the media.

Anyone seeking to build a political movement, whether conservative, liberal, or centrist, can benefit from reading this work. However, the techniques of direct mail fundraising are not completely transferrable to Internet operations. Because of the cost of postage, direct mail must be narrowly targeted to potential sympathizers in order to produce positive returns. Email, being virtually free, has generated widely broadcast, untargeted emails which have become known as spam. As a result, any unsolicited emails, even those narrowly targeted, have been stigmatized. Internet fundraising operations must therefore find ways to pull in potential donors, rather than pushing their message onto an overwhelmed public.