Las Vegas SUN: Liberal view grows online: "Liberal view grows onlineGet ringside with this interesting article on the use of the net and politics.
Activists gather at Riviera to hear Democrats
By J. Patrick Coolican, Las Vegas Sun
After news broke last week that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had accepted free ringside boxing tickets from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, a Web site immediately attacked the reporting.
Reid had voted against the interests of the commission, said the new Web site, TPMmuckraker.com. State law prevented the Nevada Democrat from paying for the tickets.
The Web site continued the rebuttal, making new arguments each time the Associated Press sent out a new story. Eventually, AP issued a defensive response.
Not long ago, a story of that nature about Reid would have gone largely unchallenged. Democrats would have watched, perhaps deflated, as one of its leading lights was pilloried for taking freebies.
Instead, this time, online Democrats were invigorated. For a variety of reasons - political, cultural, technological - liberal Web sites are in ascendance since President Bush's re-election. The most fervent evangelists among them believe they are changing politics."
This is what a real blog fest looks like. And, toss in a summit opportunity too.
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Liberal view grows online
Activists gather at Riviera to hear Democrats
By J. Patrick Coolican
Las Vegas Sun
After news broke last week that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had accepted free ringside boxing tickets from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, a Web site immediately attacked the reporting.
Reid had voted against the interests of the commission, said the new Web site, TPMmuckraker.com. State law prevented the Nevada Democrat from paying for the tickets.
The Web site continued the rebuttal, making new arguments each time the Associated Press sent out a new story. Eventually, AP issued a defensive response.
Not long ago, a story of that nature about Reid would have gone largely unchallenged. Democrats would have watched, perhaps deflated, as one of its leading lights was pilloried for taking freebies.
Instead, this time, online Democrats were invigorated. For a variety of reasons - political, cultural, technological - liberal Web sites are in ascendance since President Bush's re-election. The most fervent evangelists among them believe they are changing politics.
Daily Kos, a leading liberal Web site that has lent its name to YearlyKos , a national conference of like-minded Web sites held in Las Vegas this weekend, has about 600,000 visitors daily. That's more than the circulation of the Chicago Tribune.
The Democratic Party has begun listening, or, more accurately, logging on. More than 1,000 online activists who gather at the Riviera starting today will hear from a few past and possibly future presidential candidates - Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner. Those four, and others, will be there to try to woo the online activists and capitalize on their prodigious fundraising and organizational abilities.
It's the first gathering of its kind.
These bloggers and activists believe that they have led the opposition against Bush. More fundamentally, they see themselves as taking on and transforming their own party. The Web sites are becoming massive electronic union halls, where they can raise vast sums of money, recruit new volunteers and act as a conduit between the party and the activists. At the same time, they're demanding Democrats adopt ideas from the corporate world, such as marketing tools and bottom-line accountability.
"It's pretty clear to me that in Democratic Party politics, they're taking the blog world seriously," said Todd Gitlin, a writer and Columbia School of Journalism professor. Of the most popular blogs devoted to American politics today, eight could fairly be called liberal, four conservative, according to Technorati, a Web search engine that tracks blogs.
The ascendance of the blogs can be traced to 2000, when many Democrats watched in frustration as Republicans flooded Florida with activists during the presidential election recount. The Democrats wondered why they weren't being called into action.
Then during Bush's first term, many Democrats grew angry over what they perceived as fecklessness of their party elites in Washington as the country moved to war in Iraq and the president moved further to the right politically.
Many of these Democrats were younger, new to politics and technologically savvy. When the tools became available, they began blogging about their frustrations, or reading blogs for alternative voices and posting comments. They started to draw a significant readership.
Gina Cooper was a high school math and science teacher in Tennessee until recently. She went to the Web looking for information on Iraq before the war when she had suspicions she wasn't getting the whole story.
"It wasn't adding up," Cooper said. "I started to look for information, and I found these experts who were linking to documents and information that wasn't covered in the mainstream media."
Pretty soon, she connected with people on Daily Kos, which has a rich community area where people could meet, talk, agree and argue online and off.
"People are getting some of the rewards of politics, the sense of community, through this linkage," Gitlin said.
That interaction on liberal blogs separates them from two of the most popular conservative sites, which don't allow readers to post comments and have no means of allowing people to communicate.
Cooper wound up volunteering to organize YearlyKos, and that is all she has been doing lately. The entire conference is being put on by volunteers.
Jerome Armstrong, an early blogger on a site called MyDD, or My Direct Democracy, and co-author of a new book called "Crashing the Gate," said he and other Web denizens began thinking of themselves as shareholders in a company called the Democratic Party. It's time, he said, to hold the board of directors accountable. (In a display of the sway the bloggers have acquired across the party, Armstrong now advises Warner, who's likely to run for president as a Southern moderate.)
If the bloggers have a high-minded theorist, a visionary, it's Stirling Newberry, computer engineer, financial consultant and classical music composer. He was a crucial part of draftclark.com, which helped persuade Clark to run in the 2004 presidential election.
"We have a wide array of views," he said of liberal bloggers. "But the one thing we all agree on is that there's been a transformation in the way American society works, and the way political campaigns work."
The Internet is a great tool for finding the most influential people who are also like-minded, and drawing them into a coalition, getting them to act offline, Newberry said. "There are 30 million influentials in this country. People who make trends, form opinions," he said. "We have to have mindshare over that."
For an ostensibly democratic movement, that idea and that language - mindshare? - sounds elitist, until Newberry explains it this way: "If you're going to buy a car, there's one friend you ask because he knows cars. It's the same thing with music. Same with politics."
In other words, if Democrats can capture those people who have influence at the office water cooler or in the gym's locker room, they can again become a majority party.
As in Armstrong's reference to "shareholders," Newberry believes corporate marketing has a lot to teach Democrats, and he tends to speak the language of corporate marketing. He compares blog users to so-called "early adopters," like those people first in line to buy the new Mac who then go online and evangelize, or condemn.
"The best focus group, the best people to ask about a product, are people who are committed to your product and are an interface between your core customers and your customer target."
In political language, this is called the base. By Newberry's logic, the Democrats ignored it for too long and never sought it out for input. "Campaigns have to realize they can't just push a message out. They have to pull ideas in," Newberry said, alluding to an idea of Joe Trippi, the architect of Dean's insurgent 2004 campaign.
Trippi's name raises an uncomfortable fact for the liberal blogging community: It's still untested as a means to political victory. Dean's campaign imploded. Bush won. Republicans remain in control of Congress.
To be sure, the Web has proved its effectiveness as a fundraising tool and as a means for bringing geographically isolated people together, UNLV political scientist David Damore said.
Bloggers, for instance, now raise millions of dollars in small donor amounts, often for preferred candidates. Duncan Black's readers at atrios.blogspot.com have raised $27,000 for Ned Lamont, a Connecticut Democrat taking on incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman in a primary. Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq and perceived coziness with Bush has made him a target of online liberals, who believe blue states should have bluer representatives.
As Damore pointed out, though, "if they're not organized in key states or battlegrounds, it doesn't win elections."
The Republican message and organizing tools - talk radio and churches - have already proved their effectiveness.
For instance, David Barker, political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who studied the attitudes of Rush Limbaugh's listeners, quantified Limbaugh's persuasiveness. He found that listeners' conservative attitudes increased over time, especially on issues he talked about most.
Listening also had a mobilizing effect on moderates and conservatives, meaning they were more likely to give money or volunteer to conservative causes and candidates. When liberals listened to Limbaugh, they were less likely to become engaged in liberal causes.
This is important because radio listeners, unlike people cruising the Internet, can simply stumble upon Limbaugh's show while flipping the dial for interesting programming. His weekly cumulative audience is at least 13 million listeners, according to Talkers magazine, which tracks talk radio. And Limbaugh is not the only conservative voice in broadcasting. He is joined on radio or television by Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly and a host of conservatives in markets across the country.
Although online traffic is difficult to track, about 6 million people are active on liberal Web sites.
Newberry concedes that a blog audience is largely self-selecting. "It's not the sort of thing where you can grab someone who's neutral and grab them by the lapels and bring them in."
On the other hand, the Web effectively "takes people who are in the same place emotionally, and it organizes them. The mass media can't do that."
Also, talk radio is largely a one-way conversation, whereas liberal Web sites often host fiery debates among and between each other or with conservative opponents, bloggers say.
At the moment, the consensus among liberal bloggers would seem to be for a sooner-rather-than-later withdrawal from Iraq, but opinions are by no means monolithic. TPMCafe, for instance, is currently hosting Peter Beinart, who was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq as editor of The New Republic.
Newberry concedes that the Web hasn't yet made the difference in a national election. But he notes that TV's defining political moment didn't arrive until 1960, when Jack Kennedy's smooth charisma - and makeup - defeated Richard Nixon's sweaty brow.
Liberal bloggers usually take the long view, comparing themselves to conservatives in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. During that time, what was a political minority created outlets for debate and dissemination of ideas, including National Review magazine and the Heritage Foundation think tank. Conservatives began using large databases of names for direct-mail campaigns. All the while, they took over the Republican Party, one precinct at a time.
As for Reid and those boxing tickets, he'll be at YearlyKos. Although the senator may have been part of that Democratic establishment the bloggers so despised, he has paid attention to the liberal bloggers since becoming Senate minority leader in 2005.
And as far as they're concerned, Reid has stiffened his spine in confrontations with Republicans. Don't doubt he'll be cheered this weekend.
J. Patrick Coolican can be reached at 259-8814 or at patrick.coolican@lasvegassun.com.
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