Betting on the Bloggers

...The first is money...

...I do not like your Christians...

...That is why, as Peter Beinart has noted, Moulitsas is dead-set on defeating Joe Lieberman, who represents a politics of reasonable compromise, in Connecticut's Democratic Senate primary...

...But that's not always true...

...Readers," he said...

...Certainly the bloggers think so...

...spelled out Pi to about the fifth numeral...

...For the bloggers, perception is enough...

...According to Armstrong and Moulitsas,Dean raised $50 milhon "with an average contribution of about $70...

...Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota's special election victory...

...It eschews serious persuasive argument in favor of coalition-building...

...Richardson said...

...In their book, Armstrong and Moulitsas wax poetic when the subject turns to February 12, 2005, the day Dean became DNC chairman, ensuring the former governor a place in national politics until at least 2009, and probably beyond...

...withdrawal from Iraq...

...Three days later, in her closing remarks, conference organizer Cooper said the true achievement of YearlyKos was organizing a festival where progressives could go and "find friends...

...Ben Chandler of Kentucky's special election victory, and Rep...

...And then, just to make sure he got his point across, Richardson repeated: "I'm mainly here to acknowledge that you guys are big players...

...And this coalition is unconcerned with convincing anyone beyond its borders...

...The activists say they take their cues from the right, which, in their view, gave up short-term political victories in favor of a generational march toward partisan realignment...

...The other side of the bookend is YearlyKos...

...If this is selling out, then I want to be bought...

...Henry Cuellar in the March 2006 Texas primary—there are races where bloggers claim victory...

...What do you call your readers...

...The data sets are almost a complete match...

...and quoted the speed of light...

...listed American inventors from Franklin to Ford...

...Once the [McCain-Feingold] bill became law," Armstrong and Moulitsas write, "it upended the established order of the political world...

...Feldman went on, "At many points in the course of the YearlyKos convention, I found myself literally choked up with emotion, looking around me to see the room filled with tears of emotion...

...In Blog, his book on the phenomenon, the right-wing blogger Hugh Hewitt writes that "Kos gets 1.6 million—that's million— visitors a month...

...During his keynote speech on the final day of the conference, Mark Warner told the crowd, "Heck, it's 2006, and some of these folks are trying to re-debate evolution...

...On June 13, the blogger "dcnative" wrote: I thought I was losing my mind after the last election...

...She allowed herself to admit that sometimes the other side can be right...

...One of the featured authors at YearlyKos, John Javna, told me, "A lot of the energy comes from people knowing that they're not alone...

...And there was another way in which Dean won...

...Later, he said, "I wanted to meet you," before flashing a smile and asking, "I'm paying for this breakfast, aren't I?" Later still, he said, "I see you guys as agents of advocacy...

...Not until an unknown governor from an obscure New England state burst onto the national scene...

...Also on June 13, the blogger Jeffrey Feldman, posting on Daily Kos, wrote, "The attendees at YearlyKos were not just happy to put names with faces, but were deeply moved to be for the first time standing in a new community built entirely on trust...

...I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas once told the Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells...

...In 2005, there was Chairman Dean...

...In 2004, there was Barack Obama's primary victory, Rep...

...He's a one-on-one pol who bases his appeals on human interaction...

...On a June morning in 2006, as he stood inside the Riviera hotel and casino here, Moulitsas was the most influential blogger in the Democratic party, and about to introduce one of that party's most prominent politicians—the governor of New Mexico and former secretary of energy, Bill Richardson, who sat on a stool in the middle of the room, smiling wanly while looking tired and more than a little confused...

...In 2002, when he started his website, Daily Kos, Moulitsas was an unemployed tech worker living in Berkeley...

...In some sense, the YearlyKos conference was an exercise in social differentiation, a way to say, I am not that, whether that is a religious nut who votes conservative or a neocon warmonger...

...Clark was playing to the audience's conception of its own intelligence...

...Their central achievement was getting the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, whose hometown is 45 minutes south of here, to agree to attend...

...He told a long, involved story about his participation in a "radiation project" while a young man in Arkansas...

...By contrast, Richardson currently holds the world handshaking record...

...Cooper then told the story of "mom-ster," a grandmother who had never written a blog before YearlyKos, but had started a Daily Kos "diary" with the help of her new acquaintances...

...Later, the blogger continued, "I'd never felt the love of community you were supposed to feel in a parish or a sangha, but I felt it this weekend at YearlyKos...

...I get to introduce everybody," Moulitsas told the small group of bloggers attending the breakfast with Richardson...

...Then he paused again, and turned to Moulitsas...

...Dean being chairman would not have happened without this space," the blog-ger and economist Stirling Newberry told me...

...Visit YearlyKos or any other gathering of liberal bloggers, however, and you are struck by the fact that most of the authors of such blogs are personable, polite, articulate, intelligent, well-read, and humorous...

...This sentiment is nothing new...

...We should be the party of space...

...The politicians seem to agree...

...This vote was a triumph for the Deaniacs and the left-wing bloggers, even though it '< may have cost Kerry the election, as it gave rise to his much-mocked explanation: "I actually did vote for the $87 million before I voted against it...

...Just listen to its founders...

...For many attendees, the answers to all political questions were self-evident...

...In his opening-night keynote address, Moulitsas told the crowd, "These have been heady days for the People Power Movement...

...The next morning, Howard Dean told the crowd, "You are the first generation, I think, that [are] citizens of the whole world, because of the Net...

...For every example of a "netroots" candidate tumbling to defeat—Dean's loss in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett's loss to Republican Jean Schmidt in a 2005 special election in Ohio, former congressman Ciro Rodriguez's loss to Bush ally and fellow Democrat Rep...

...In Crashing the Gate, Armstrong and Moulitsas write, "It's not an ideological movement—there is actually very little, issue-wise, that unites more modern party activists except, perhaps, opposition to the Iraq War . . ." And yet, if Armstrong and Moulitsas are correct, their movement is not a substantive engagement with the issues facing the country...

...and the once and future presidential candidate General Wesley Clark...

...The audience loved every minute...

...So, while the netroots build their coalition and bide their time, they are content to let what they call the "Democratic establishment"—the Democrats who aim to govern beyond the echo chamber—suffer defeat...

...He felt distraught at Bush's reelection...

...I'm for space...

...I spoke to more than half a dozen bloggers, Democratic apparatchiks, and hangers-on while at YearlyKos, and each was welcoming and eager to chat...

...Not quite...

...Yet Moulitsas's bio on the jacket of C-rash-ing the Gate, the new book he wrote with fellow blogger and Democratic strategist Jerome Armstrong, claims Daily Kos "now gets more than a million unique visitors each day...

...These are the shocktroops of the People Power Movement...

...And it's only four years old...

...And we're in this one...

...Assuming there are 1 million regular readers of Daily Kos throughout America, that is still only 1/280th of the population—and only 1/59th of the number of people who voted for John Kerry in the last election...

...We should be the party of science," Gov...

...In 2003, at the start of the presidential fundraising cycle, they needed one to emerge quickly...

...He's probably never "blogged" in his life...

...But, as Gloria Totten, the executive director of Progressive Majority, a liberal activist group, said at YearlyKos, "Perception in politics is reality...

...Historically, the Republican party has had a large base of small donors from which it can solicit funds...

...This is one of his political gifts, and one of the reasons he is so popular among the netroots...

...Reid wrote in a letter to each attendee...

...It's pretty cool...

...For politics, however, they are small...

...No one knows, of course, exactly what role the blog-gers played in Dean's rise to party chair...

...In the Sixties, what we fought for was individual rights, equal rights under the law for every single American, and we are still fighting for those things today, but we have lost our way starting in 1980, when the ME party took over from the WE party...

...But there were plenty of twenty- and thirtysomethings here, too, young people in college or just entering the workforce...

...Readers," Richardson said, resuming his speech...

...That same day, the blogger DarkSyde posted something written on the plane home from Las Vegas...

...Thus it was somewhat discomfiting when, on the third day of the conference, Howard Dean told the crowd, This is a movement that is not so different from the movement in the Sixties, to take back America to a better place, or bring America to a better place than where it was...

...The press often cites the figure that Daily Kos receives more than 600,000 unique visitors a day...

...He gave a rambling speech...

...And Richardson...

...Yet Dean is currently— alongside Pelosi and Reid—a part of the triumvirate leading the Democratic party...

...In fact, rather than a convention of the "losers" of the global economy, YearlyKos was attended, for the most part, by the "winners...

...One of Moulitsas's readers, a former secondary school teacher named Gina Cooper, first had the idea for the gathering shortly after the 2004 elections...

...For the bloggers, the road to Las Vegas had been long...

...In 2006, Blog-ads, an Internet company, conducted its own survey of progressive bloggers...

...At a moment when Democratic candidates face close races almost everywhere in the country, one of the party's most influential constituencies is looking only for politicians who emote, who oppose, who rail against Bush, the GOP, and the war...

...It's one of the perks of being who I am now...

...One of the most heavily attended panels at YearlyKos was called "Championing Science" and dealt with alleged Republican attempts to undermine the Enlightenment...

...Readers of Daily Kos and other left-wing blogs feel under attack—besieged by the Republican party and the conservative movement and, most of all, the Religious Right...

...After Election Day, Kerry returned to the Senate, where he's moved further to the left, meanwhile plotting his return to the presidential arena...

...Dean lost the nomination fight, but his fundraising strategy was successful enough that the Kerry campaign quickly adopted it...

...They are so unlike your Christ...

...Most opposed the Iraq war, and most viewed orthodox religion with suspicion...

...It is a tiny fraction of the American electorate...

...On the first morning of the conference, I met Jonathan, a Mormon from Utah with a background in computer science...

...gave the Newtonian formula for gravity...

...Bush won, Kerry lost—though all the exit polls argued the other way...

...Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean...

...Megachurches are a very scary thing," John Javna told me...

...This emphasis on community—and this pervasive sense of loneliness—was also present in the after-action reports written about YearlyKos...

...All of them lost...

...In the conference's exhibition hall, a man from carryabigsticker.com sold bumperstickers...

...But no one saw it coming...

...But what do the shocktroops actually believe...

...In the post, DarkSyde wrote of a "wonderful, warm lady and YK volunteer" named "Shanna," who broke down crying while she was trying to convey to a small room of people just how much it meant to her to be allowed to work like a dog for no pay and little recognition...

...Once that happened, other politicians signed on: Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia and prospective presidential candidate...

...What the bloggers share with the Deaniacs, and what the Deaniacs shared with the supporters of the late Eugene McCarthy, is an almost religious conception of their participation in a movement...

...Many of the others are in education, or they are political professionals, here to harness the bloggers for partisan ends...

...The Democrats haven't...

...Readers," a few people said...

...That was one piece of the bookend...

...At one point, Richardson said, "I am here most of the morning to recognize you guys, to recognize the power of blog-gers...

...While the politicians were working to tap a new source of campaign money, the bloggers, it seemed, cared more about being with people who agreed with them and dreaming of future Democratic victories...

...The governor's slip-up seemed to bother no one, which makes sense, considering it occurred in the middle of what could only be called a slavish attempt to further inflate the bloggers' already considerable self-regard...

...That is why Howard Dean is still the standard-bearer of Internet politics...

...he asked...

...That much was apparent, anyway, when, more than halfway through his talk, Richardson told the bloggers, "I think many of your customers . . . " Then he paused...

...You are an unstoppable force in educating Americans on important issues and ensuring the American people know the truth," Sen...

...California senator Barbara Boxer...

...Paul Hack-ett, the failed House candidate, once said, "The Republican party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden...

...senator Conrad Burns, and the Vietnam war veteran, author, and former Republican Jim Webb, who won the Virginia Democratic primary to challenge U.S senator George Allen...

...Statistically, it's the same demographic, more or less...

...Another featured the iconographic "Hooded prisoner" from Abu Ghraib next to the slogan, "Who Would Jesus Torture...

...Customers...

...House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (who cancelled at the last Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of The K Street Gang (Douhleday...

...The flip side to this suspicion of orthodox religion is a fetishization of science and technology...

...In most profiles of Moulitsas, mention is made of the more than $500,000 he raised online for more than a dozen candidates in the 2004 cycle...

...Can I be in love with a thousand...

...Reading blogs, he said, was "therapy...

...And so they turn to others who think as they do...

...Moulitsas likes to say that the average Daily Kos reader is 45 years old, which a cursory glance at the attendees at YearlyKos seemed to confirm...

...It was difficult to find commonalities among all the bloggers at YearlyKos...

...namedropped Copernicus, Aristotle, and Aquinas...

...They spend their time online, reading and sometimes commenting on each other's posts about the latest Republican evils...

...But his form of politics is different from the bloggers...

...What worries me," Clark said, "is the conflict out there between faith and reason, faith and science...

...One did...

...And this is why the conventional metrics used to evaluate Moulitsas's political effectiveness are off...

...Iowa governor and prospective presidential candidate Tom Vilsack...

...For blogs, those are large numbers...

...And that is why Hillary Clinton was roundly booed when she told the audience at last week's Take Back America conference— an annual gathering of liberal activists, including some YearlyKos attendees—that she opposed a timetable for U.S...

...This deprived the Democrats, in particular, of millions of dollars...

...Moving to a Red State from the Bay Area 5 years ago was such a culture shock I nearly lost it," momster wrote in her first diary entry, "but [I] was saved by reading blogs on a daily basis, saving my sanity...

...The keynote speaker on the science panel was General Clark, who bravely told the audience, "Science is one of the things that's near and dear to my heart...

...The number was actually over $1 million," Moulitsas has claimed on his website...

...Typically, this is interpreted as a sign that association with the left-wing bloggers is a sure way to lose an election...

...To a great extent, Dean was addressing the same movement...

...Jonathan was sitting next to Mark, a computer science teacher from Pennsylvania, who said that the web provided him with an "alternative community," somewhere he could go to escape the Fox News Channel...

...More than half the people I met had a background in, or are actively working in, the technology sector...

...Who are you people and where have you been all my life...

...What's more, Armstrong and Moulitsas—and the "netroots" at large— take partial credit for Dean's rise...

...I'm just all about winning...

...However, one could say that ultimately Dean was the victor—which brings us to the other reason the Democratic bloggers have influence...

...One featured a purported quote from Gandhi: "I like your Christ...

...Inside Crashing the Gate, Armstrong and Moulitsas write that the top liberal blogs grow at a geometric rate, and that, "by late November 2005, the top seventy or so liberal blogs, led by Daily Kos, garnered about 60 million page-views every month...

...The bloggers emerged as a force in the Democratic party right around the time that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations went into effect, limiting the political parties' ability to raise large sums of money for "party building...

...In 2005, the Pew Foundation released a demographic survey of Howard Dean supporters...

...She approached Moulitsas, who lent his moniker while leaving most of the organizing to Cooper and more than two dozen unpaid volunteers...

...The Deaniacs, it turned out, were overwhelmingly white, well-educated, well-off, and between 45 and 64 years old...

...The rise of Howard Dean, for whom both Armstrong and Moulitsas consulted, demonstrated that the Internet could act as an online ATM for the Democratic party, taking in small-dollar contributions with the click of a button...

...The ferocity, and popularity, of Dean's antiwar politics shifted the debate among Democrats, arguably forcing Kerry to vote against the $87 billion for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003...

...In the bloggers' view, the GOP is a party of "theocons" who want to impose a version of conservative Christianity on unbelievers...

...I think I finally got some mojo...

...It was the second morning of the first annual Year-lyKos, a gathering of more than 900 left-wing bloggers, more than 100 journalists, and half a dozen national Democratic politicians, all inspired by Moulitsas's website...

...From what I could tell, there were few members of the antiglobalization movement, which for much of the world is the locus of lefty politics...

...It is not a condemnation of Moulitsas or his readership to say that, should the Democrats win a substantial victory in November 2006, they will promptly take credit for it...

...That week, I lost my religion at a meditation retreat...

...Visit Daily Kos or any of the other top liberal blogs, and you are struck by the rhetoric, which is heated and more often than not profane, and the partisanship, which is unyielding...

...The governor has been in politics for a long time, and is a master of the art—always ready with an answer, articulate, assured yet self-deprecating...

...At the moment, the netroots is a political movement with only the fuzziest ideology...

...And so far in 2006, there is Jon Tester, a Montana state senator and Moulitsas favorite, who won the Democratic primary to challenge embattled U.S...

...Are they...

...tackled cosmology ("Apparently, there are many, many universes...

...He began to read liberal blogs after the 2004 election...

...Most everyone had a college degree, and most everyone was well-dressed...

...Once, Moulitsas wrote on his website: "Let's not forget that ultimately, Osama's vision for the Arab world is far more akin to the Right's vision of America...

...In her speech, Sen...

...minute...

...That was the loss...

...Boxer said, "The netroots"—another word for the left-wing blogs—"is key to giving people courage and strength to stand up—even when it's lonely...

...It is also an increasingly influential tiny fraction, for two reasons...

...For those I spoke to, "community" was what mattered most...

...Newberry, the economist, described the bloggers as "meritocrats...

...How many lefty political bloggers there actually are is unclear...