[NYCFarmboy]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/other...-barone15.html

February 15, 2005

BY MICHAEL BARONE

Going into the 2004 election cycle, just about everyone said the Internet was going to change politics. But no one was sure how. Now we know.

The first signs of change came from the Howard Dean campaign. His campaign manager, Joe Trippi, used the Internet, and meetup.com and moveon.org to identify and bring together Bush-haters from all over the country, and raise far more money than anyone expected.

Dean rose to the top in the polls and amassed an e-mail list of 600,000 names. When Democratic voters dropped Dean as unelectable and embraced John Kerry as the most readily available instrument to beat George W. Bush, Kerry inherited Dean's Internet constituency. No one expected the Kerry campaign to raise more money than the Bush campaign. But it did, largely because of the Internet.

The Democratic Internet constituency was and is motivated by one thing more than anything else: hatred of George W. Bush. To see that, you only have to take a look at dailykos.com, run by Democratic consultant Markos Moulitsas, which gets 400,000 page views a day -- far more than any other political weblog -- and which received funding from the Dean campaign (which Moulitsas disclosed). It seethes with hatred of Bush, constantly attacks Republicans and excoriates Democrats who don't oppose Bush root and branch.

When four American contractors were killed in Iraq in April 2004, dailykos.com wrote: ''I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.'' This repulsive comment produced no drop-off in page views. This was what the left blogosphere wanted. Kos was an early enthusiast for Dean's campaign for Democratic chairman and disparaged other candidates.

For 12 years, Democratic chairmen were chosen by Bill Clinton. He built a new generation of fund-raisers who relished contact with the Clintons. Now, the big money comes from the left blogosphere and Bush-hating billionaires like George Soros. Dean gives them what they want.

As Dean says, ''I hate the Republicans and everything that they stand for.'' Hate. But Bush hatred was not enough to beat Bush in 2004 -- Democratic turnout was up, but Republican turnout was up more -- and doesn't seem likely to beat Republicans in 2006 and 2008. The left blogosphere has driven the Democrats into an electoral cul-de-sac.

The Bush campaign, quietly, used the Internet to build an e-mail list of 7.5 million names and a corps of 1.4 million volunteers, who produced more new votes than the Democrats. But the right blogosphere was different from the left. There was no one dominant Web site and no one orthodoxy. Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor whose instapundit.com gets 200,000 page hits a day, supports Bush on Iraq but disagrees with him on abortion, stem-cell research and same- sex marriage. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats, but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media.

The right blogosphere's greatest triumph came after CBS' Dan Rather reported that Bush had shirked duty in the National Guard and the network posted its 1972-dated documents on the Web.

Within four hours, a blogger on freerepublic.com pointed out that they looked as though they had were created on Microsoft Word. CBS defended the documents for 11 days, but finally confessed error and eased Rather out as anchor. Mainstream media tried to defeat Bush, but only discredited itself. The Pew Center's post-election poll showed a sharp decline in the credibility of newspapers and broadcast TV.

So what hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both help Bush and the GOP.

[OldManMac]

[NYCFarmboy]

Originally posted by KarlG:

Karl you have a very nice blouse.

[OldManMac]

Thanks. I got it on sale at Blouses R Us.

[Sherwin]

Frank's latest pulls an interesting thought on the Dem political bloggers...

so it's starting to look like some people on the left want to bring down the status of blogs entirely, thinking that stopping the right-leaning blogs is important enough to take down the lefty ones as collateral damage

(if you want a laugh, be sure to check out the drawings)

[Millennium]

Interesting. It would seem that for all the stuff Republicans say about the Democrats being 'disorganized', the Republicans appear to have the greater diversity of opinion, may have taken the election because of this, and not even know it. This is an opportunity on which the Democrats could capitalize if they play their cards right.

Will they? I don't know. Part of the problem is that dailyKos -which makes quite a point of portraying itself as a "Democrat site", not a "liberal site"- doesn't exactly set a good example for Democrats to follow, what with its "interesting" journalistic techniques and often virulently-hateful content. For example, a particularly popular tactic several months ago was portray Republicans -not individual Republicans, but the party as a whole- as wanting to build concentration camps for gays.

There are sensible, rational sites for Democrats out there, but this isn't one of them. It is, instead, pretty much everything that it accuses Republicans of being, but so arrogant that it can't even see this in itself.

[dreilly1]

I think it's quite simple -- both parties have kooks. It just so happens that left-wing kooks are more likely to embrace the internet than right-wing kooks.

And one of the things about the Internet is that it's relatively easy for a few kooks to get heard if they shout loud enough. And it's funny -- for all the talk we hear about the Internet enriching us all by providing different points of view on issues from all over the world, that only works if you bother to go out and find those points of view. And if the only political stand you take is that George Bush is a fascist, it's easy to surround yourself with sites that agree with you, while ignoring the sites that don't agree with you. And if you get all your news from the Internet and the Daily show, like lots of young (mostly liberal) voters do nowadays, you can provide your own personal "News Filter" that's much more effective than the "Liberal Media".

If there's one thing that the Republican party is good at, it's the concept of only letting the kooks out of their cages when they absolutely need their votes. The Democrats seem to be guided by the kooks who shout the loudest right now. (And that's not a slam at Dean, although now that I think about it, that was pretty clever, huh? )