August 9, 2006 11:15 AM PDT
Lieberman defeat a win for 'Netroots' politics?
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Buzz about the political blogosphere and its potential power reached the national scene during the 2004 presidential race, when former Vermont governor Howard Dean made a name for himself with a campaign that was largely run online. Dean's defeat in the primaries, however, led many to believe that perhaps the Internet's potential as a campaign tool was overrated.
But now that 18-year incumbent and one-time vice presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman has failed to win the Democratic nomination for Connecticut's Senate seat thanks to millionaire cable-TV executive and political novice Ned Lamont, candidates from across the political spectrum may be looking at the "Netroots" more seriously.
Lamont's campaign had an official blogger, regular support from liberal mega-blog DailyKos, and a YouTube group called "Nedheads" that currently ranks 13th in membership on the popular video site. And most Lamont supporters are eager to paint Lieberman as quite the technophobe, a task made easier when the senator's official Web site mysteriously crashed on primary day. Lieberman's campaign suspected the work of malicious Lamont followers; liberal bloggers laughed it off and suggested that perhaps Lieberman's staff hadn't anticipated the amount of bandwidth they'd need to handle election-day traffic.
A Netroots turning point?
According to Lowell Feld, the official "Netroots Coordinator" for Jim Webb, the Democrat who will be challenging incumbent Republican Senator George Allen in Virginia this November, last night's primary was a sign that the blogosphere (or Netroots, a truncation of "Internet grassroots") has established itself as a powerful force in electoral politics.
"The enthusiasm and interest in (the Lieberman-Lamont primary) was incredible," says Feld, a Lamont supporter, citing the various blogs as well as major news sources that experienced bandwidth problems during the primary as a consequence of Internet users trying to find out the race results. "That shows you something right there."
"The Lamont campaign is the best example to date of a tech-savvy campaign," says Zack Exley, who worked at liberal political action committee MoveOn.org when it first emerged during the 2004 elections and later did work for John Kerry's unsuccessful presidential bid before branching out into nonprofit work. A tech-savvy campaign, he says, is one that "understands that the purpose of technology in politics is to get boots on the ground in the real world, and to actually sway voters and turn out voters in reality," a point sometimes missed by campaigns grounded in the online realm.
Lamont's best online tactic, according to Exley, was his first one: The Greenwich businessman's initial campaign announcement said that he would run only if 10,000 volunteers and donors pledged their support. "I think that was the most innovative thing that he did online," Exley observes, "and it really allowed his campaign to start so much faster than it otherwise would have. It allowed him to almost immediately generate powerful grassroots and financial support for his campaign." Exley thinks we'll see other politicians adopt that model, including those in the 2008 presidential primaries.
Besides the blogosphere's strength as a recruitment tool, it can help a candidate by simply being loud enough to attract the attention of the mainstream media, Feld said. "The interest (within traditional media) was enormous," he said. "Why was the interest so enormous? Sure, Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate in 2000, but was it that interesting of a race inherently? Once the Netroots really got in there and started publicizing it and getting enthused about it, it certainly ratcheted it up a few notches."
Yankee Group analyst Jennifer Simpson describes the Netroots as an emerging strategy for bringing together and publicizing already-existing political sentiment. "What we are beginning to realize about blogs is that they represent some feelings that are already out there. By making those feelings available on the Net, you are able to spread them." Prominent blogs, such as DailyKos on the left and RedState on the right, "can really begin to influence who's doing what." But Simpson is reluctant to make assumptions. "It can be very hard to assess the exact power of blogs," she said.
When asked about future implications, Simpson maintains that it's too early to tell, and stresses that a statewide primary election is very different from a national election like the presidency. The "blogosphere" represents "an ongoing and expanding array of tools" for political campaigns, she says, but national campaigns will need to reach a much wider audience and consequently will have to rely on both traditional and new media.
But that won't diminish the enthusiasm among the pro-Lamont crowd, excited over not only their victory but also the potential to further shake up the establishment. On both sides of the political spectrum, Lowell Feld says, "the Netroots is very difficult to control. It's a force, an independent force. You can try to guide it and shape it, but it doesn't necessarily succumb to that at all."
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Kooks can win primaries, but let's see what happens when the rest of us vote.
So Ned is a Multimillionaire, Living in Greenwich, owns a Cable Company, Do the math --- He's not here for the working man, He's here for the Rich cronies.
Lieberman will run and win as an independent. When you get down to the issues, what can Ned Lamont say on anything critical to the State of Connecticut.
Lets see what happens when the republicans add someone to the pool.
Or better yet, lets let NY have Greenwich and Ned and Hillary can fight it out..... Connecticut will win again.
First, let me point out that my first point of contact with politics on the net came back in early 2003 when Moveon.org sent me an email out of the blue about petitioning against Bushes' anticipated war in Iraq. Normally I would have deleted such an email, but at that moment like most rank and file Democrats I was in despair about what I saw about to happen and about the persistent passivity of the Party that had been going on Since Bill Clinton's time. So I let their emails come, and immediately developed a trust for their style and instinct. They were savvy and direct and said exactly what I would say, not all the convoluted trickery of the Clintonites. Over the course of the following 3 years I paid attention to their calls for petition signatures and noted their organized gatherings. I did not trust the Democratic National Committee, but I trusted Moveon.org, so they really focused my efforts throughout the election period.
In the Spring of this year Moveon held a referendum for its members asking us whether we would support Lieberman or Lamont; when the members overwhelmingly chose to go with Lamont, Moveon directed its efforts to announcing gatherings, appearances, and fundraising efforts for Lamont. Democracy was working the way one would hope; this unstructured free association of Connecticut Democrats had a coordinating body to focus our concrete efforts where they needed to go. It turns out that there are 50,000 subscribers to the Moveon.org email in Connecticut, so they were arguably the force behind Ned's ability to get delegates at the State nominating convention that launched him into viability.
As this Moveon.org activity was going on among us middle-aged registered voters, the national media began making a lot of noise about the influence of blogs and websites that most Moveon.org members were not much aware of: the right-wing talking heads at Fox and MSNBC began to claim that the "Daily KOS" was giving marching orders to an army of left-wingers who were tilting the party left, etc. Now I like Marcos Moulitsos in the few times I've seen him on tv, but one of the facts about the "blogosphere" is that it's very fragmented; to this day I've not even logged in to that site once, let alone taken marching orders from it. I read Eric Alterman every day but have only logged in to Salon once; and so it goes. So far as I can tell the influence of the blogs had been in generating a lot of young volunteers who started showing up in some of the campaign headquarters Ned opened up in Connecticut, and that's a good thing; but Connecticut Democrats were getting our "marching orders" from Moveon.org. The role of that organization was more concrete and pivotal in making the campaign, while the role of the blogs was, as Marcos said this week, to "make buzz". When the history of the primary phase of this election is written, the blogs became important after Moveon.org laid the organizing groundwork.
Phase 2 of this campaign, running in front of Connecticut's citizens, is unlikely to be such a smashing success for the net elements. The bulk of the citizenry are still detached from the net and will still have to be extracted house by house and mall by mall and hand to hand. Fundraising is not an issue in this race, with Ned having unlimited resources, but any other candidate would have to make use of the net elements to do that. So we'll see whether the net elements have any unexpected influence on the traditional campaign now that they've taken the primary...
campaign, though innovative and *ahem* successful in its
appeal to and use of the Internet -- he had a Net consultant who
knew how to run a website, for one thing, while Joe switched to
GoDaddy on election day -- the bloggers are not campaign
workers. Did Rove pay LGF and the bloggers who did their best
to trash Kerry? Did they take orders from him? I presume they
were just of one mind about most things. Right?
I don't know where you people have been, but these were not
leftists. These are mainstream people, expressing themselves
using the Internet, which outflanks the Rep and Dem
establishments which depend on media buys and saturating
bombing runs of crappy and non-informative commercials. This
is better way of getting the message out. Information Age,
anybody?
Lamont is a centrist. Lieberman went too far to the right, getting
endorsements from Hannity, Coulter et al. On the same night
that Lamont won, voters in Georgia kicked out Cynthia McKinney
-- a leftist -- for a centrist. Meanwhile, in Michigan, the
Republican Club for Growth kicked out a centrist Republican who
dissented on stem cells and other causes so dear to the
wingnuts' hearts. Lincoln Chaffee may be drummed out of the
party for dissenting from the wingnut line. So who's the
extremist?
All of Lamont's positions, according to the polls, are supported
by a majority of the American people.
Both parties currently, have lost the plot totally, and appear more interested in creating an absolute repressive police state with minimal political freedoms, all in the name of protecting us from the nameless terrorist, whilst simultaneously bankrupting the nation to third world standards with unsustainable government debt levels to pay for very short term gains indeed!
Oh well, since Lieberman, like many in the current existing majority of elected representatives in both houses of Congress facing mid term elections, took their fingers off the pulse, to pander the special interest of a vain greedy minority, only time will tell as to whether the wishes of the voters will be granted!
profound effect on the outcome, but the medium is irrelevant.
Speaking politically for a moment, Lieberman lost favor of his
party, namely the ones that get out and vote in the primaries. If
twice as many had shown up to vote in a less debated election, I
think we'd have something to talk about, but as it is, it was just
another democratic primary shifting the party out of center.
Come election time, Lamont or whatever the challenger's name
is will be forced back to center otherwise he'll end up with
nothing more in the total vote count than those who got off their
duffs and voted in the primary. I know CNet makes it's dough off
of reporting on technology, but this is a stretch because it's just
politics as usual. Story is a no-story I'm afraid.
Those netroots are a major win for the Republican party. Because they have imposed a Stalinist type purge on the Democrats, now they Dems will be easily crushed by either the Independents (Lieberman) or the Conservatives (Republicans).
I love my net roots... MMMMMMMM
upon the world by the neo-con, right wing fringe. The republicans
have decimated the country over the past 6 years. Lieberman's loss
is just the beginning, and rightfully so. Americans are no longer
going to tolerate self defeating policies of endless war and fear.
For sure if there is another attack here at home, it won't be because we "cut and ran" but because that agency that supposed to be "Homeland defense" didn't do it job. The dept. is just another pork barrel for republicans to get money by supplying the dept. with so called needed office amenities. Your being hood winked into believing that they can protect us against terrorest. between the budget for homeland defence and the civil war in Iraq, it's costing us our schools, highways, and social programs billions and let's not forget the wounded who come home with less of their bodies than when they went to fight them over there. All the families who suffer with the deaths and wounded of our armed forces because a wet nosed president had these great bombs and jets and wanted to see how they worked. He sits in his office and just like those video games, he pushes a button and someone dies.
Cut and Run, and save our young from harm.
What the election may indicate, in the long run, depends heavily on who the Republicans run, how they interact with Lieberman's independent candidacy, and what the final percentages are.
Do recall, Clinton won his first term with a minority, primarily because the conservative vote split fairly evenly between Bush and Peroit, and was followed by the Republican takeover of congress.
My personal opinion, is if Lamont loses the CT race to Lieberman, the Democrat party is going to fisure into its moderate and extreme elements, with its radical side dieing out of politics. Johnson's significant victory over McKinney would seem to be such and indicator.
By the same token, I see similar indicators on the Republican side, though Republicans are presenting a more unified front, seeing the threat of a Democrat victory as being more important right now.
If the Democrats do split, however, I certainly see the moderate and radical elements of the Republican party separating as well, with a likely merger of the more conservative Democrats and the more liberal Republicans into a new opposition party.
Frankly, I think that's probably the best possibility in the long run. Maybe we could get past the "he/she's an "X" and therefor is evil/incompetent/corrupt/eats babies" we've gotten ourselves into.
One can dream.
The dems and republicans are opposite sides of the same coin.
If you think we are living in a 2 party state, you are only kidding yourself. They exist for one reason, to divide the country to keep it under control. Conservatives vs Liberals, Pro-life vs Pro-choice, ect. No other reason. Both parties have the exact same financial backers, they argue in public and then agree to destroy our once great nation in private.
Contrary to popular belief the media is not controlled by liberals. Its owners have to look left to see Hitler.Why do you think the mainstream press has given Bush a free ride while he systematically destroys our security, freedom, morals, and credibility? Meanwhile the alleged libral Clinton was hammered for lying about having sex.
Yeah, that is balanced.
- ROVE IS A GENIUS!!!
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by mgreere
August 12, 2006 9:43 AM PDT
- He gets that emotional associations trump words.
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See all 46 Comments >>Democrats = pansies
Republicans = fighters
Facts = irrelevant
And always make your opponents strength their liability. Classic
Rove. The Lieberman talking points are an excellent example.
Fvcking mastermind. (Or at least he gets marketing when others
don't.)
Hey, exactly that worked in the last 3 elections!
Why not do it again?