I salute Greg Mitchell both for the clarity of his argument and the boldness of his claim. What were the key moments in the campaign: Bill Clinton's plunge into campaigning for Hilary and John McCain's decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate. Why did Obama win? Because he alone understood the new media and the new political landscape they opened up.

As it happens I don't agree with any of these propositions, but however much I may fault his logic I admire Greg for not hedging his bets. Also I think he's completely right that the new media (blogs, websites, RSS feeds) have completely changed the way campaigns are and can be covered. And like him I think that change is mostly a good thing. Indeed I once wrote that the new media "has gone a long way toward providing a level playing field for political reporters around the country. It is now possible for a reporter based in Seattle, for example, to read what the Arkansas papers have to say about Clinton's record -- in some cases even before those papers are on the newsstands." That was back in 1992, when the new media I had in mind was the American Political Network's Campaign Hotline, an e-mailed digest that is to the internet what the Stanley Steamer is to a Toyota Prius!

But I share Randall Wray's view that it was the economy what won it for Obama. I'd guess that September 15, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt (and Americans realized that Bush and Co could fuck up countries a lot closer to home than Afghanistan and Iraq) or September 24, when McCain "suspended" his campaign (and Americans realized that the kinder, gentler Bush Lite he and Palin were offering just couldn't cut it) were both more important than the choice of VP by either party.

Really though I want to worry a little more (along with David Schorr) about how much the new media really do imply a new politics. As someone who (like every other on-line Obama donor) still gets daily emails from David Plouffe, I see the form of a new, participatory, cyber-movement poliitics. And certainly the fund raising potential first demonstrated by Howard Dean's cyber-insurgency has proved an enormous factor. And since money still dominates our politics that is no small thing.

But despite the tact of whoever writes Plouffe's emails I don't really think of this (or experience it) as a two-way process. Just to take an example, I'd bet the Obama donor base was a lot more distressed by the attack on Gaza than was reflected in administration policy. And I'd be willing to bet we're a lot more dubious about bailing out Goldman, Sachs, and a lot more sympathetic to single-payer healthcare. Yet there is no way, with in the pseudo-movement structure of the continuing Obama campaign, to make those views matter.

On the other hand--or maybe on the same hand--it is far from clear to me that the new media can't be manipulated and skewed just as much as the old media. Imagine what Ross Perot (who used his wealth to go over the heads of the old gatekeepers) could have done with the web. Or a less benign cyber-demagogue, with deep pockets and web savvy and all the techniques of viral marketing.

Finally I worry that all this attention to the message of the media is just another excuse to remeain inside the bubble--exactly the opposite of where I had hoped the new technology's level playing field might be leading us way back in 1992. At the time I advocated leaving the campaign coverage to a tiny pool, and freeing reporters to actually get out into the country and write about the stuff that politics is supposed to be about. That still seems to me a good idea.