the netroots
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=138101
The Netroots Election? Not So Fast ari melber
Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel say they are happy to
share credit for the Democrats’ electoral success, but not everyone
in the party is feeling as generous. Progressive bloggers, who often
promote and criticize the Democratic Party with equal vigor, want
their props. MyDD blogger Chris Bowers concluded that netroots
activists were crucial to victory–long before the votes were
counted. Last month, he wrote that “most, if not all, of the
significant improvements Democrats have made from 2004 to 2006 were
generated primarily within the netroots and the progressive
movement.” Yet the election results suggest the netroots’ scorecard
is decidedly mixed.
The blogs’ most famous candidate and top fundraising beneficiary, Ned
Lamont, lost his bid to unseat Senator Joe Lieberman. One of the
campaign’s senior advisors, former Clinton White House counsel Lanny
Davis, said the victory “proved the blogosphere is all wind and very
little sail.” Bloggers tell a different story: the unusual, three-way
race should not be judged strictly by who won but also by its success
in helping “make Iraq the center of this electoral season,” as Joel
Silberman wrote on FireDogLake. If Lamont’s loss is counted as a
symbolic effort that beat expectations, his performance fits a
pattern. Many of the netroots’ most popular House candidates beat
expectations this week, but ultimately lost.
While there is no single, authoritative list of netroots candidates,
ActBlue.com, a Democratic fundraising clearinghouse, lists the
candidates nominated by top blogs and ranks them by total donors.
Looking at their top 20 Democratic House candidates, so far ten have
lost, three have won and the other seven are in races that are still
too close too call at the time of writing. The netroots’ lost races
include national names, such as FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley in
Minnesota and New York’s Eric Massa, the popular former aide to Gen.
Wesley Clark. Winners include attorney Paul Hodes in New Hampshire
and two veterans, Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Tim Walz in
Minnesota. (Bloggers also provided critical early support to long-
shot Senate challengers Jon Tester and Jim Webb, who were locked in
races that were also still too close to call on Wednesday morning.)
Yet regardless of the remaining results and recounts, the fact is the
netroots’ favorite candidates did not perform as well as the
Democrats targeted by party leaders. And they were never supposed to.
Many of the bloggers’ picks were aggressive Democrats in long-shot
districts who were neglected by the Beltway establishment. There is
no doubt that bloggers leveraged money and political buzz to make
races more competitive and put Republicans on the defensive, but it
was simply not the decisive factor in the elections
John Aravosis writes AmericaBlog, which raised over $100,000 from
about 1,900 activists this cycle, but on election night he resisted
attempts to measure the netroots’ impact. “It’s too hard to define
who did what. We could have defined quite easily that John Kerry lost
it for us if he had not shut up after two days, but to know whether
blogs [had a bigger effect than] unions is like saying was Rahm
Emanuel more effective than Howard Dean? I don’t know,” he told The
Nation. That sentiment is probably shared by many netroots activists,
who are more focused on the Democratic victory than parceling out
credit.
The more interesting question, Aravosis argues, is how will the blogs
adapt to working with “Democrats who actually have power.” In the
short term, he hopes to hammer home the message that the election
proves Americans think conservatism is “inherently wrong,” rally
support for voting rights reform, and support the House Democrats’
new agenda. Other bloggers are more interested in crafting the
agenda: Arianna Huffington’s top blog on election night chastised
Howard Dean for backtracking so far on Iraq in a CNN interview that
he sounded like he was pitching “the president’s plan.”
Mr. Davis, a self-described “liberal Democrat” who repeatedly tangled
with bloggers during his work on behalf of Joe Lieberman, said on
election night that the blogosphere must evolve in order to have a
broader impact. “If the blogosphere is to have an impact on changing
the country as opposed to talking to each other, the Lamont campaign
is a lesson in exactly what not to do. They came out of a primary and
they continued to wage a primary,” he said, “but they weren’t talking
to unaffiliated voters and moderate Republicans.” Davis told The
Nation he has a new proposal that the blogosphere establish voluntary
rules for “fairness, accuracy and accountability,” requiring writers
and commentors to provide their real names, phone numbers and
addresses, and forbidding anonymous comments offering misleading or
personal attacks. He argues that Democrats cannot change the minds of
people voting against their “economic self-interest” by offering
“words of hate” or “anonymous attacks.”
Benjamin Rahn, President of ActBlue.com, believes online activists
have already cleared that hurdle, because they are part of the
offline political dialogue across the country. “In many ways the
netroots are just the most visible part of the nationwide grassroots
movement. The conversations happening online, in the blogosphere, and
by e-mail from friend to friend to friend, are also happening in bars
and coffee shops and PTA meetings. We just don’t happen to mike them
and put the audio online for everyone to hear,” he explained via e-
mail. “And the people who used ActBlue to fundraise are also the
people who made phone calls with MoveOn’s call to change, and waved
signs at street corners today, and helped out at polling places. And
those are the people who are going to wake up tomorrow and say “Damn,
that felt good. Let’s do it again.”