How will the Internet in general and the blogosphere specifically affect the future of the Democratic Party? There have been a couple of posts in the Left Blogosphere lately that speak to that point. First, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller of MyDD have produced a summary report of the political blogosphere with a focus on the Left Blogosphere. Here’s a quick summary of its contents:
The report includes all of the following:
- Background on the political impact of blogs
- The role of right-wing blogs within the Republican Noise Machine
- The emergence of new online progressive constituencies
- A discussion of early conservative netroots dominance
- A discussion on the rise of the progressive netroots
- A look into conservative “blog sprawl”
- A guide for Democratic campaigns to better connect with the netroots
- A summary of the competitive advantages of the left and right-wing blogospheres
- A comprehensive listing of the 100 most trafficked progressive blogs and netroots sites, sorted by traffic
- A companion listing of the 129 conservative blogs and netroots sites with traffic equal to or greater than the 100th ranked liberal blog
This report really is must reading for anyone interested in the political blogosphere left, right, or center. I’m not as convinced as the authors that the tendency of the major left-leaning blogs to be self-contained communities is an unalloyed blessing.
This morning kos had a post that was also directly on point:
It seems that campaigns have learned the wrong lesson about the Hackett surprise, with a bunch of campaigns asking to 1) meet with me, and 2) help them raise money.
That’s a double insult.
First of all, I’m not a gatekeeper. I don’t decide who is “in” and who is “out”. All these campaigns profess love for the netroots, yet none of them seem to be doing anything more to “reach out” to the netroots than sending me an email. That’s not reaching out the netroots, that’s reaching out to me. And I’m not the netroots. I’m a small cog in a netroots chock full of small cogs.
And just as importantly, the netroots is not an ATM. It’s a message and activist machine. You do everything right, there’s some money. But if you start sniffing around the blogs expecting to see dollar signs you’re going to be sorely dissapointed.
Read the whole thing. On the one hand, I think that if the netroots actually succeeds in getting its candidates elected it will be a major political force. Right now it appears to me there’s a lot more heat than light. On the other hand, I think it will be a struggle for the netroots to have the kind of influence over candidates and campaigns that it clearly wants. The roles and relationships within the Democratic Party power structure have been established for quite some time now and I suspect the current players will be reluctant to grant the newcomers a seat at the table. So for now, as kos points out, the netroots is an ATM for Democratic pols.
