Medium and Movement
Matt Stoller's initial post on the origins, nature and future of the "netroots" as a progressive political movement is an excellent point of departure for a discussion that should go beyond his analysis.
I have two key questions for Matt and other commentators: To what extent is the "netroots" a movement rather than an expression of a new and ideologically inchoate medium? And is the resurgent Left adequately represented by the "netroots?"
Matt differs from a number of other progressive netroots prophets (most notably Markos Moulitsas) in emphasizing the ideological, as opposed to simply partisan, nature of the "movement." As a result, he's more interested in the ideological antecedents of the netroots in the New Left than in its organizational counterparts on the Old Right. This is a distinction that sometimes gets lost in the general progressive netroots obsession with message discipline (more about that below): Matt's less interested in creating a Left-Wing Noise Machine than in ensuring the Noise Machine is truly Left.
This frank interest in the ideological content of netroots discourse also leads Stoller to an honest assessment of the inbred limits of that discourse: the upscale white folks who dominate the netroots are unlikely to represent the full range of progressive concerns, much less the full range of progressive voices.
Matt's esteemed colleague at MyDD, Chris Bowers, has been much more explicit in acknowledging the limited overlap of the netroots with the actual progressive grassroots of Democratic and/or progressive rank-and-file voters. But hardly anyone in the progressive netroots movement has quite come clean about the best example of this disconnect: the fate of the founding political expression of the movement, the Dean campaign of 2004, which crashed and burned (ironically, at the very moment when the hated DC Democratic establishment was busily making its peace with The Doctor) upon its first exposure to the actual grassroots in the Iowa Caucuses.
Matt's brief note on the relationship of the netroots with the Kerry presidential campaign also doesn't quite get around to mentioning that the unhappiness of bloggers with KE04 was more than echoed by DC establishment Democrats. The main forces in the party pleased with KE04 were the single-issue advocacy groups that both netroots and "DC Pundit" types disliked. So it's all a bit more complicated than the usual netroots versus Establishment--or left versus center--analysis tends to admit.
But the broader question is whether the internet-enabled explosion of progressive expression can really be captured in any "movement," ideological or partisan.
As anyone who reads progressive blogs or subscribes to progressive sites will readily acknowledge, the single largest political change enabled by the Internet revolution has been centrifugal, not centripital. Almost overnight, hundreds, maybe thousands, of well-informed and articulate advocates whose views would in the past have been consigned to the cranky confines of Letters to the Editor columns have been given a platform that rivals newspapers and magazines in readership and influence. Put aside for a moment any prejudices about the ideological orientation of MSM journalists and "bloggers," and it becomes obvious that what's going on is simply a technological subversion of a professional monopoly.
And it's not just a matter of bloggers challenging conventional journalists (or for that matter, DC bloviators): the latter are responding to the competition. It's hard today to find a newspaper, magazine, or mainstream political organization that isn't engaging directly with the netroots. And I don't know a single political journalist under the age of 60 who doesn't read, or more likely contribute to, political blogs.
I'm often amused by the hysteria that breaks out among bloggers when they are attacked by some Old MSM Journalist or political consultant. Look at the employers of these netroots detractors: they're making a better argument for the political relevance of internet-based journalism than any blogger could ever make.
The impact of blogs and other net-based political vehicles rather obviously extends beyond movement-building to opinion-shaping, which is why "message discipline" is so transcendantly important to progressive bloggers. But the medium is bigger than the movement, as it should be. And if I had one big wish for the progressive blogosphere, it would be to urge a relaxation of the tendency to excoriate true diversity of opinion.
Progressive bloggers may rightly deplore the oppressive effects of being exorcised by MSM opinion. But in the blogosphere, the odd chance of being noticed or attacked by some Washington Post columnist pales in comparison to the horrible risk of being named Wanker of the Day by Atrios.
The progressive movement is bigger than the netroots, and progressive political discourse over the internet medium is bigger than any movement. But both are harmed by excessive devotion to conformity, whether it's ideological, partisan, or personal in nature.
"Inchoate" seems like a good choice of words to me. I don't have Matt's faith in net roots either. One sees it in the mainstream media only when people like Kristof make fun of it. Does that mean that the mainstream media are outdated or that we're not having an impact? I can't help thinking the latter, when the media shape so much else in the public debate. Heck, Matt isn't famous even to me, and I waste enough time online.
Related objections to self-congratulation in blogsville are obvious. For one, it's easy to hear people talking to one another, whereas MLK's march on Washington, something we remember today, spoke to a nation, not to mention to its legislators. Now, galvanizing the roots has a purpose, too. The GOP has been good at it. But one has to ask whether we've hard evidence that it's been translating, at least yet, into gains in turnout or funding.
For another, as NN says, one can underestimate the positive, united force of earlier movements. By contrast, if one reads here each day, one sees vigorous debate. In fact, that's why I read. This series of posts is part of that.
Finally, Matt underestimates how conservatives can organize, because he doesn't see them as comparable to liberal bloggers. But that's only because they're effective at what they do. Yglesias seems to spend most of his time having to debunk Jonah Goldberg and others, and just because they're sponsored by wealthy media and private networks doesn't mean they don't have influence; quite the opposite. As I've commented before, a reading of the public editor's apologies at The Times, or indeed a reading of the paper's studious attempts at balance, shows how vociferously they do get out the voice vote.
I'm not saying the Web doesn't present real opportunities. I learn from it, for sure, when the media overlook things like, well, just this week Edwards's speech. But it's way too soon for the celebrities it's produced to start trumpeting their effectiveness. Bono isn't a political movement to the left either.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
January 15, 2007 4:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the response, it's good food for thought. I'm actually not limiting my discussion to the netroots, that was Josh Marshall's formulation.
I don't think that Dean's Iowa loss represents a good example of a disconnect any more than Reagan's loss to Ford in 1976 suggested that conservative activists were out of step with their party. I mean labor was behind Dean and he lost, and it's hard to call labor unrepresentative of a certain slice of the grassroots.
In fact the parallels to the right are eery - a wave of conservatives elected and primary challenges in 1978, similar to the wave of liberals and a very significant primary challenge in 2006, followed by a realigning election in 1980.
Anyway, it has become a lot less comfortable to be a conservative in the Democratic Party these days.
January 15, 2007 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let us review.
I remember my father talking about the army of reporters his newspaper had on staff. They had bureaus in Europe, South America, Washington DC and all over the Middle West. He was always concerned that he wouldn't have enough money to pay the staff.
My father predated media consolidation and the rise of the media star. For many years media consolidation and a star driven media model has reduced the opportunities available for journalists. Very few newspapers have their own offices outside of town. Maybe the New York Times and a precious few others. But not many. There are just fewer opportunities for journalists.
Media consolidation has increased pressure on the bottom line of every newspaper, local radio and local television station. I know highly trained journalists who work for low pay at a small newspaper as photo journalists taking pictures and writing the stories about everything from high school football games to wrecks on the interstate to routine murders. That paper is owned by a media group headquartered on one of the coasts. Orders from the head office--send us profits. We don't care how. Reduce staff, hold the line on raises. Just send us more profits.
One of my friends left journalism to work in the advertising department of his newspaper. He is not alone. He couldn't stand selling ads, so he left the newspaper business all together. (He became and Episcopal priest.) Oddly his wife recently received a Pulitzer. I am not sure her job is safe.
The star driven model (which is related to improving the bottom line for the far distant media company) has lead to the rise of the cross over "journalist" who reports stories, writes books and delivers opinion. The best known of these media stars is Bob Woodward. There are many others. Stars such as Woodward are paid star wages. Star wages lead to the reduction of openings for journalists at many newspapers. Tim Russert and Katy Couric are examples of stars in broadcast media. I wonder how many producers and other staff their networks had to let go to pay their salaries?
As media has consolidated, fewer and fewer stars are needed. Those that remain are paid higher and higher wages. The newspaper that paid my way college had 4 or 5 nationally known journalists. That same newspaper after several rounds of media consolidation doesn't have a single nationally known reporter or opinion writer.
A parallel process is happening in television and radio. As a kid I remember local television and radio reporters. In my town except for the local PBS and NPR stations there isn't a local program being produced. The local news TV reporters are few and far between. "If it bleeds it leads" has led to a situation where college professors are used to supplement news reporters when the rare non-crime story is covered. Whole elections come and go with little or no reporting on local issues.
Technology has allowed more things to be done by fewer people. Remember those switch hitting photojournalists. They are possible primarily because of the digital camera. That helps, but not much.
Then along comes the Internet. Boom, boom, boom. The ad revenue that was supporting newspapers and local television is reduced. More layoffs of competent and qualified journalists.
But the Internet has one giant advantage. Compared to even a small city daily, it is downright cheap to produce a blog. Any ad revenue goes straight to the bottom line.
Guess what, there are a lot of people out there who want to hear a range of voices. There always have been. There are a lot of people out there who have ideas they want to express. Unlike me, many are good writers. Bob Woodward, no, but really good writers just the same.
I happen to think the Internet is allowing the rebirth of journalism as it existed before media consolidation and the rise of the star system. That is a good thing.
Ron Byers
January 15, 2007 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think Ed's take is pretty much on target. Right now there are certain political tendencies that are more pronounced in the blogosphere and net-based media than in the older and more established communications culture. But that doesn't make for a movement. The internet, including blogs, etc. are a vehicle for movements, and will be increasingly important in organizing them and getting their messages out. But it will contain many movements.
I do believe that internet communication will become increasingly prevalent throughout our society in the years to come, and the "progressive netroots", such as they are, will move further out of the angry white guy ghetto (where I dwell, I suppose), and take on more characteristics of the broader progressive community. At that point it will be clear there is no one specific movement - just a whole bunch of diverse people talking and arguing in a new and more accelerated way.
Every society evolves certain ways of controlling and limiting debate, and defining the bounds of acceptable opinion. What seems to have happened in the past few years is that the penetration of the new communication technologies reached a critical point, so that the participants in the older and more established communications culture could no longer ignore the new emerging culture, or pretend it wasn't there. So there has been a sort of political communications insurgency that has pushed a lot of previously proscribed or marginalized opinion over the threshold of respectability - or at least "unignorability".
And to the puzzlement and consternation of some of the cultivators of elite opinion, it has turned out that attitudes they thought were firmly established and consensual throughout their political communities were not so established and consensual after all. There were great masses of people who had never signed on to that stuff, but had no channel to voice their dissent broadly and publicly.
But just like the insurgents in Iraq, the newcomers represent a whole bunch of conflicting tendencies that will only become more pronounced as the net community continues to expand and becomes fully integrated with all of the other media.
Presently there is still a lot of mutual envy and resentment between those who clearly belong to the new net communications culture and those who clearly belong to the older culture - although more and more people are part of both cultures, and ultimately that divide will become much less important. The netroots folks resent the fact that, even though they think their opinions are aften as worthwhile and well-substantiated as the views of the established cadres of opinion leaders, the latter still have more access to power and more control over the levers of government decision-making.
The established elites, on the other hand, seem to envy the netroots people for their freedom to say blunt things that the elites can't get away with. They sometimes feign shock and outrage, but I sense a lot of frustration with their confinement. And anonymity really pisses them off. (That's why we see the occasional episodes of sockpuppetry and clandestine slumming in the blogospheric comments sections by runaways from the established mainstream communications channels. I suspect this phenomenon is even more prevalent than is appreciated.)
Elite opinion leaders used to be able to count on a certain level of privacy in their discussions and deliberations, even when those discussions took place in a "public" forum. The writers and readers of Commentary could rest easy that nobody was paying much attention to what they were saying other than the writers and readers of Commentary. And for some reason, the media participated in a gentleman's agreement not to trouble the masses about the strategies that were being cooked up in the journals of elite opinion. They seem to have developed an informal "need to know" system, and classified certain pieces of knowledge as above the public's clearance level. Hey, those were only people who were going to run the next government after all.
But then those nasty blogs came along, and it turned out that you could quickly post and rapidly disseminate some piece of writing that effectively called bullshit on what some pundit or think-tanker might have been saying on television, that either didn't match or dissembled what they were saying in their opinion journals. And all of those quasi-exclusive plans and schemes were dragged all over the internet and exposed.
What I'm interested in seeing is how both governments and elite opinion crafters will move to re-establish secrecy and privacy. They were careless for a while, putting their opinions down in writing on the internet where just anyone could read them. But I think we are already seeing the end of that, and my guess is that these people are now communicating more and more through exclusive mailing lists and other private channels than they did three or four years ago.
January 15, 2007 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Kilgore asks:
I figured before I thought about this I better make sure I had a firm grasp of the meaning of inchoate. Then I began to think, what in the world does he mean by an inchoate medium? Is any medium anything other than inchoate? And finally I thought why does he think these are key questions? I also thought whether there was anything wrong with a medium being inchoate. Tentatively, I've decided this.
I hardly consider myself a netizen, though I'm faithful around the café. But I'm incredibly thankful for the existence of this community, movement or not, inchoate or not. It reconnected me to politics and gave me a sense that there were many persons who thought as I did, though the MSM gave me few clues they existed.
aMike
January 15, 2007 7:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Personally, I think that blogs are certainly just a medium, and those who use them can have any ideological orientation or none at all, but that the way progressive blogs have developed makes them more like a movement than one might expect. Because one thing blogs do is to make policy arguments that would once have been known mostly to professionals available to everyone.
Think of Josh Marshall's Social Security work, for instance: one thing about it was that if you read his blog during that period, you ended up knowing a whole lot more about Social Security than most people ever knew before. How big the alleged problem with is was, the pros and cons of various plans, what 'bend points' and 'price indexing' are -- I mean, this level of knowledge, among a reasonably large number of people who don't analyze Social Security for a living, was pretty extraordinary. And there are any number of smaller points: the number of people who, when told that Sen. X voted against evil bill Y, promptly ask: but how did s/he vote on the cloture bill?
Similarly, those of us who read blogs are in a position to make, read, and respond to a lot of pretty serious policy arguments and those of us who actually hang out in the comments sections of our own blogs (and have smart commenters) have to field objections from people armed with masses of statistics we've never encountered before.
It's a much richer discussion than one could get from reading a paper (much as I love newspapers.) And it's wide open to anyone who wants to participate.
It's a normal consequence of this sort of environment that people will sometimes actually convince one another, and that at least some people's opinions will start to converge. And this makes for movement-like possibilities, I think. It will probably never be a disciplined movement, but therein lies its strength, I think.
About the annoyance with various media pundits: at least in my case, it has two sources. One is that the picture they paint of bloggers is completely at odds with what I see. It's as though they were having some collective 60s flashback. Speaking for myself in particular (not that I suppose I'm who they have in mind, but since a lot of them just talk about 'bloggers', who can say?): I'm a mild-mannered philosophy professor in my 40s, and when I read that I am, unbeknownst to myself, actually an angry rabble-rousing blogofascist with no standards, it's kind of funny.
Second: so many of them were so wrong about Iraq. They were so wrong. Reading their arguments, and their subsequent changes of heart, is like (groping for an example here) talking to people who said: gee, 9/11 showed me that there was evil in the world! I actually heard someone say this once -- a teenager, so he had an excuse -- and read op-eds that said similar things, and I thought: what exactly did you believe about the world before? I mean: if you're not a teenager, it shouldn't take 9/11 to show you that.
A lot of the commentators writing about Iraq before the war had, to me, this same surrealistically naive quality to them. I would read what they wrote and think: huh? And these are people who are, unlike my teenage friend, adults who are paid to think interesting thoughts about current affairs.
And I suppose a third thing is this: a lot of them still seem to make the assumption that the people who opposed the war were weird hippies who just oppose all wars. And gosh, who could have supposed that people like that could be right? -- Again, it infuriates me to hear this. There were lots of people like, oh, Jim Webb and Brent Scowcroft who are not those unserious peaceniks we keep hearing about, and who managed to oppose the war before it started.
Me too. I'm not a professional. I'm also not a pacifist. I supported Gulf 1, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the unfortunately nonexistent intervention in Rwanda. It wasn't that hard to see reasons to oppose the war: noticing that Saddam and bin Laden were deeply unlikely allies helped, as did seeing that the Bush administration was already botching Afghanistan, as did the thought: why on earth should the suspicion that Saddam might have WMD, though no means of delivering them to us, somehow entail that we must invade? Don't any of these people remember the Cold War, when a horrible country had a whole lot of nuclear weapons attached to actual missiles, pointed straight at us, and yet we somehow survived?
There's something about reading people who got this so thoroughly wrong when they are paid to get it right talking about the likes of Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum and Atrios and Matt Yglesias as strange angry hippies who are, of course, completely unserious about policy that makes me rather annoyed.
That's all.
January 15, 2007 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
How "resurgent" is the left? It looked to me like 2006 was a repudiation of George Bush and the people who hijacked foreign policy and drove it off a cliff rather than an embrace of the left. We had no real "message" we were selling voters in '06 beyond competence and honesty, which theoretically, anyway, transcends labels like "left" or "right."
Which brings me to my next point. Stoller's original post underscores the problem the left will have with the "netroots" as some kind of organizing force. Competence and honesty will only get you so far. After a while, it might be two years or ten, but it will happen, the memory of how Godawful W has been will fade, and then we could be dealing with the same dynamic that killed the party in '94, 2002, and 2004: a left-leaning organization in a right leaning country. What we need is some intelligent planning, the sort of deux ex that the right gets from their "noise machine." We need to be smarter and better organized than they are to make up for the uneven pitch we play on. And right now, we aren't there yet, not even close, certainly not on the internet (although I will grant that we are closer than we were a few years ago). The right gets an opportunity (the recent Boxer-Rice flap is a perfect example), and immediately you will hear the entire right wing establishment flock to it and start parroting the same message, as if on cue (I have come to believe they have to have some kind of permanent war room looking for stuff like this, probably complete with focus groups to test out how to present their message). We can't get that from the netroots; for one thing the transparency of the medium makes it impossible, for another, the people who comprise the netroots are, themselves, grossly inadequate to the task. Again, look at Stoller's post as an example: the wishful thinking; the odd belief that one's own anger is somehow a benefit in electoral politics; the tendency towards hero worship (amateurism); the dismissal of people who think differently than you as "silly" or part of some inept, senile establishment (amateurism squared) -- and keep in mind, he's one of the bright ones.
The right has a professional message machine. They understand how to influence the media, how to craft their message to appeal to peoples' baser instincts, how to ridicule and deride in a way that invites the average person (and journalist) to jump on board (curiously enough, you'll often see "netroots" people themselves faithfully parroting right wing talking points -- these are the people who are supposed to craft our message?), how to shape their tactical moves into a larger electoral strategy. What the netroots offer, by contrast, is a place where people can get together and pool their ideas and, with luck, their money. The right had that 40 years ago, with religious and business organizations forming the bedrock upon which they would build their extra-party political apparatus. Maybe the netroots can be the left's bedrock and maybe not, but it sure isn't the apparatus itself, and it's absurd to think it could be. It will be useful on issues-based politicking (Social Security was a wonderful example of this), fundraising, brainstorming -- but there needs to be an organizing force, a guiding hand to sharpen and aim our message, and by the nature of the internet itself, the "netroots" can't be that force.
In my view, the left will be "resurgent" when it has a realistic strategy for winning the image game. That strategy isn't on the internet; I've been looking for it for several years now and it isn't to be found. I can, on the other hand, turn on the radio on my way to work in the morning and hear the right's strategy in action, on several different channels, and in turn, I'll see a variation of that strategy in action in a magazine or newspaper the next day or week. That's resurgence.
January 15, 2007 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is a really interesting post. On the one hand, it highlights the almost paradoxical (and, I think, quixotic) attempt to characterize the netroots as a political movement.
The fact the netroots are apparently "inchoate" in nature pretty much confirms the futility of trying to charaterize its political essence.
For me, defining the netroots is rather like defining money - and in Hicksian terms, money is as money does. And so it is with the netroots. And for me, the big thing that the netroots facilitates is the ability to challenge conventional wisdom. This in itself is no small matter, and the full impact has yet to be felt. As a few people have mentioned, when the likes of Joe Klein (in the Time blog) ventured into the blogosphere, there was palpable shock at the vehemence and effectiveness with which people were able and prepared to challenge what Klein evidently believed was pretty uncontroversial commentary.
This is not to say however that the netroots are unable to organize and participate in movement politics, but like you I see that as an effect of the medium, rather than its raison d'etre.
One quick point about the right-wing blogosphere. Unlike Matt Stoller, I do not underestimate its ability to organize. They might have arrived later to the game, and they may still a heckuva job to catch up with leftwing activists, but its not like they won't be trying, and it's not like they won't get better. I think the big difference so far is that during its formative years, the blogosphere has pitted a plethora of highly motivated progressives (whose movement had been pretty much frozen out of the mainstream political discourse) who found the internet to be an outlet for their thinking, against a handful of technophile conservatives (whose movement was largely in control of the establishment) who because of the political status quo were not likely to build up as large a following.
I don't believe this contradicts the argument that the netroots are a medium rather than a movement - it is just that conservative thinking became the conventional wisdom when the netroots developed, and thus the key issue the netroots offered (the ability to challenge conventional wisdom) was a natural fit with progressive necessities at the time.
I would make one last point about the GOP's ability to organize. It still centers enormously around activating the evangelical base (at least till the last election...). Be interesting to see how this might change, but for certain, at present the Democratic netroots beat the living daylights out of the GOP's fighting keyboarders.
January 16, 2007 7:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Internet is another way to get organized and participate in the political process but it selects peole who are internet savvy, educated, etc and thus the higher average income (blogads--most earn more than $75K). These people may not have the time to put shoes on the ground but internet provides them an easy way to get involve.
Thus the whole grassroot movement of the Democratic Party may be composed of several groups of people with different stripes but are united with one goal to elect Democratic Party leaders who share their common ideology and netroots is just one group.
January 16, 2007 7:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
But blogs have realize their power to persuade and put down a candidate and thus can be exposed to abuse--such as blackmailing a politician subtlely to advertise with them or they dont get articles that promote them instead get articles that criticize them.
How do we prevent that? How do we differentiate a puff or paid article which promote a candidate vs a genuine spontaneuous sentiment? What are the rules that govern disclosure of their relationship with a candidate?
January 16, 2007 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's interesting to read the comments as a whole. Supporters of Matt S.'s post point to the real value of a diverse, decentralized, even undisciplined community. Luigi, like me, worries about the power of discipline on the right. Now, part of the irony here is that much of the commenting and posting on this very site for as long as I can read has been blaming the Democrats for either not playing hardball when swift boated or not being able to turn a fragile majority or sad minority into a machine able to block court nominees or a war.
Probably there are lessons to be learned from all sides here. We can't demand too much of either bloggers or institutions when we're still building both as political forces. Can we do more to bridge the two forces? I see Nathan as asking for that and Dean as having pressed it in the past. After all, organized labor itself has been reinventing itself. Once it was the political expression of people like Meany, and those of us of a certain age still remember construction workers beating up protestors. Even young people are more likely to think of labor as the supporters of Gephardt last time out.
That doesn't mean labor isn't a progressive force. I just mean we're all going to be working on new constructions, so it's way too early, as I said before about Matt S., for self-congratulation. When we out here in virtual reality and political leaders together can acquire the force such that the mainstream media don't happily perpetuate Dean's scream, Kerry's Swift Boat myth, and so on, I'll be glad. Till then, I hesitate either to blame the liberal establishment or be proud of ourselves.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
January 16, 2007 7:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
That struck me as well. It's inchoate, and has the following clear characteristics.
I would not use the word inchoate in any case. What is distinctive about the blogosphere is that has emergent properties. It's one thing for 350 people to write an angry letter to Time that gets opened by an intern and then discarded. It's another thing for 350 to post publicly the same letter. It's this absence of control that frightens Joe Klein and his ilk.
I also think that it's a little frightening to see the quality of the more prominent bloggers' work. How can Joe justify his fat salary if Glenn Greenwald writes rings around him every day?
January 16, 2007 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
My own feeling is that while anonymity can be perfectly fine when discussing issues, posts from unverifiable sources should not have much credibility. Yes, the blogosphere cherishes anonymity, but, at some point, does practicing it serve the political process?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
January 16, 2007 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
[deleted duplicate]
January 16, 2007 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I understand what is meant by ideologically inchoate medium:
netroots are a factory for tactical thinking, where the best expressions of asynchronous, textual communication find their way to the top.
progressive movement: strategic thinking, debated by, qualified by, testified about, but not created by threads or nested text. (I have hope for wikis, but who can tell?)
That still takes essay length thinking, careful processing of traditum, etc.
Matt is smack in the middle of it, and this is the most refreshing break I've had from purely tactical thinking since November.
January 16, 2007 7:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the Dean campaign of 2004, which crashed and burned (ironically, at the very moment when the hated DC Democratic establishment was busily making its peace with The Doctor) upon its first exposure to the actual grassroots in the Iowa Caucuses. Ed Kilgore
So, smear ads David Jones -- "We did more with $600,000 than Howard Dean did with $41 million" -- was making his peace with Dean?
And the Likudnik "Club for Growth" PAC's -- . . . Dean "should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading . . . body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont. Where it belongs" -- was just trying to save Iowa workers' jobs?
The DNC and the DLC were all over those boys! Right.
That old revisionist song.
January 17, 2007 5:04 AM | Reply | Permalink