In his post kicking off the discussion of his book, "Bloggers on The Bus: How The Internet Changed Politics and The Press, Eric Boehlert writes:

I wrote Bloggers on the Bus because I wanted to help tell the story of the rise of the liberal blogosphere. . . .I thought the liberal blogosphere deserved respect and I felt it was important to document its rise.

Eric performs an admirable job in the telling of that story. If you care at all about political blogging, you must read Eric's book. At the end of his book (and in his post), Eric basically poses the question what now? I would hope that the question is answered by remembering why it came to be at all. It was not just a question of available technology. It was issues that spurred the birth of political blogging. No political party invented it. No political party owned it. It truly was bottom up - driven by concerns about issues - not the fortunes of political parties or individuals.

Eric's book reminded me of the unsatisfactory effort turned in by Matt Bai in his 2007 book about Democratic politics and the blogs, "The Argument." It struck me that Bai simply had no iunderstanding of what the blogs were about and why they came to be. Eric clearly does understand. At the Guardian Onliine, I wrote about Bai's book:

I believe he simply does not grasp the origins of the "netroots" - the loose grouping of anti-war, progressive bloggers that has sprung up during the Bush presidency - or what it has become.

In an earlier Guardian Online piece, I wrote:

Consider Matt Bai's new book on US politics, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. Joan Walsh's review of the book has Bai describing a netroots that I hardly recognized, and Walsh discussing a netroots that seems to no longer exist. Bai finds the netroots consumed with hate for Bush and Republicans, along with a lust for power. To Bai, the netroots does not care about issues at all. Walsh describes Bai's view:

"The lefty blogosphere's effort to defeat Lieberman, according to Bai, was marked by two features the writer can't abide: the bloggers' desire to exert power for its own sake, and even worse, a desire to exert power motivated mainly by hatred. He quotes his friend Markos [Moulitsas] as saying if the bloggers could take down Lieberman 'then no one will want to be the Joe Lieberman of 2008'."

In contrast, Walsh's view of the netroots is one of bloggers driven by an obsession to end the Iraq war:

"[Bai] minimizes what the Iraq war means to bloggers, to Democrats, to the vast majority of American voters, to the world, in order to depict Democratic insurgents as power-mad kingmakers or simply haters."

But I was unconvinced by Walsh's description at the time and more and more, the Bai description seems more apt now than it did then. Eric concludes his opening blog post with this observation:

[T]here are also lots of thorny questions that we can address. . . . [T]here's the blogosphere's nuanced and complicated relationship with the Obama White House. I certainly get the sense that most bloggers are more than happy to play defense for the WH and fend off the incessant, and nutty, right-wing attacks that began on Inauguration Day. But in terms of policy and agenda, especially hot-button issues like war funding, wiretapping, gay marriage, etc, the blogs definitely have a much more challenging task than they did when they and they readers could simply oppose, vigorously, all things Bush.

Has the blogosphere met that challenge so far? In my view, largely no. The irony of course is, as Eric observed in his book, the Obama campaign, and now the Obama Administration, largely disdained the blogs. While the Left blogs wanted to embrace Obama as one of their own, Obama made it perfectly clear that he did not want to be a member of that club. He famously said "he does not read blogs." As far as Obama is concerned, blogs are not "On The Bus." But their unquestioning love came anyway.

Will that change now? As Roland Hedley, Jr. famously remarked, time will tell.