Kos's Post Op-Ed Asserts Netroots as '08 Kingmaker

12:30 AM May 07, 2006

In Sunday's Washington Post, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos fires a fusillade from the blogrolls into the Democratic establishment, arguing (with hedges appropriate to one who has already parlayed his online prominence into lucrative party consultancies) that presumptive 2008 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton can't win the netroots' blessing, and can't take the White House without it.

Moulitsas himself may be the least interesting thing about the namesake blog-city that's accidentally catapulted him into prominence. A cynic might say he's doing nothing more than getting out in front of a sure net-level parade against the DLC-driven Clinton machine, and he doesn't venture anything more substantive of Hillary than the blogs-against-the-dumbass-consultants theme he's used for ages prior to Crashing the Gates. Ultimately, he burns no bridges and positions himself to assert blogland credit for any possible outcome, including (given the Internet's quarter-billion-dollar rally 'round bland insider John Kerry once the nomination was decided) an actual Hillary win.

What the piece does do, obliquely, is escalate into the establishment media the critique fellow Democratic blogger Chris Bowers recently issued of Democratic chieftains viewing their computer-savvy constituents as unruly teenagers and seeming ashamed, in the midst of their historic losing streak, to accept aid or counsel from this vast and motivated community of supporters.

And indeed that is a self-defeatingly blinkered view. The post-mortem (.pdf) of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet on the 2004 campaign reveals, among other things,

"The Internet was influential in leveling the playing field between small donors and large donors ... Internet donors were more likely to forward political e-mail, to ask someone to support their candidate or to ask someone to donate money. They more readily would link up with other supporters at house parties or Meetups. And people who were online were much more likely to be influential with their friends and neighbors."

Not to mention a commanding lead for Democrats in contributions online (below), that proverbial mother's milk. Fundraising, communicating and organizing online offer too much efficiency not to continue their growth and rewrite the way parties and campaigns are managed. That's a given.

But the Internet is a medium much larger than blogs, as anyone still deleting Kerry e-solicitations will attest. "Blogs," that rorschach blot of a neologism, stands in for a very hazy concept of teeming masses crashing the gates (as it were) -- that might just happen to have a great deal to do with kos' own bid for influence in Democratic circles. By staking his claim on electability, he's asserting a power broker role for liberal activists without actually assenting to their principles.

Principles like, what do you do about Iraq if you ever actually get to (have to?) govern? Neither bloggers nor pols can play coy with this forever. It's past time for unambiguous withdrawal to be the order of the day, and if you embrace that as a Democrat, you immediately face the question of whether or not you're prepared to enforce it by denying support to a hawk like Hillary in the general election.

Kos has made it pretty clear in other contexts that his bottom line is always to back Democrats. That has every potential of splintering his power base -- and his party -- as the election approaches.

Blogs may have been kids borrowing the keys to the car in '04. In '08, they mean to take title, deed and proof of insurance. Whether or not they're taking us anywhere different remains to be seen.

Add a comment