National Democrats AND the Blogosphere

Glenn Greenwald writes about Crashing the Gate and the blogosphere at Crooks and Liars. I have not read Kos and Armstrong’s book yet, but was not favorably impressed by some of the exerts. The title of Greenwald’s post highlights what I fear may be the major problem with the book: National Democrats v. the Blogosphere.

If bloggers expect to be taken seriously by the political establishment, they are not going to do so by setting up their relationship as an adversarial one. If we look at this as one side against the other, neither side is without fault. There is no doubt that the Democrat leadership was poorly prepared to take on the role of an opposition party. This does not mean that criticism from the blogosphere is universally correct.

One mistake is to lump the entire party establishment on one side and all bloggers on the other. Both groups show considerable diversity in their beliefs and in their attitudes towards the other. Most major candidates are making use of blogs to some degree, and I’m sure all would love to receive the financial and possibly organizational support which candidates like Howard Dean received. Despite generally being on the other side of “the gate,” Kos receives some attention from the national party. Harry Reid is speaking at the yearly Kos convention, and many members of the Democratic establishment have blogged there and on other blogs (including at The Democratic Daily). John and Teresa Kerry have both been extremely supportive of bloggers. (Beyond the Kerrys my personal experience with the Democratic establishment is limited. I did happen to meet Michigan Governor Granholm while we were both sitting at the pool at Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island over Labor Day before the 2004 election. When I mentioned that a picture I was taking of her would likely wind up on a pro-Kerry blog, she was fine with the idea.)

Greenwald misunderstands the fears of some politicians to be too closely associated with the bloggers when he confuses bloggers with average citizens. The blogosphere often tends towards the extremes in each party, while the majority of voters are in the middle. This leads to many of the frictions and misunderstandings.

The blogosphere is of value when it reminds political leaders of important principles, but is counterproductive when it confuses attempts to attract voters from the middle with selling out. The most notable example of this has been seen with the attacks on John Kerry, whose attempts to demonstrate to the voters that Democrats are not weak on national security was twisted as being pro-war. Despite being one of the first Democrats to stand up to Bush on foreign policy, and despite frequently urging Bush not to go to war in Iraq, some bloggers such as Kos regularly distorted his position. Kos’s tactic of misquoting Kerry in order to attack him makes it impossible to take him seriously as an alternative voice to the Democratic establishment, and most likely he will remain on the fringes, outside of “the gate.”

Blogs often serve an important role in discussing what the mainstream media ignores. At other times, some bloggers beg to appear irrelevant by dwelling on items which the general public ignores for good reason. While some bloggers persist in using the IWR vote as a false litmus test, most voters were smart enough to recognize that Bush was the pro-war and Kerry the anti-war candidate.

Bloggers who continue to falsely claim that Kerry supported the war, who think there is a shred of logic behind their mantra that “Kerry conceded before all the votes were counted” and ignore the actual work towards election reform, or who use Skull and Bones to devise theories that Kerry did not want to win, are thinking so beyond the realm of reality that they will never be able to have a meaningful impact, and the Democratic establishment would be wise to stay clear of them. Other bloggers are more likely to play a role, but by demonstrating their value and not by dreaming of crashing any gates.