The piece that has coalesced this line of thinking for the right was penned by Dean Barnett of the Weekly Standard: I'm just going to stop right there for a minute. While so far the article shows some understanding of the blogosphere and the people who read blogs, already in this article Dean Barnett has referred to Dailykos as "the Daily Kos" six times. This reminds me of how, when I was a teenager, many adults would refer to something as "the MTV," "the HBO," or "the Pearl Jam." Attaching an unnecessary article to the beginning of any new term has, at least in my life, been an unmistakable marker indicating that someone is unfamiliar with the subject they are discussing. As someone who has been visiting Dailykos for three years, and who knows many people who have been doing the same, never once have I heard someone refer to it as "the Daily Kos."

Anyway, the basic argument of the piece is that the rise of left-wing blogs has been bad for the Democratic Party because bloggers are "far-left," "shrill," "potty-mouthed," outside of the American "mainstream," and still not really very large. Further, while the Democratic Party has been trying to harness the power of blogs, they do not seem to understand blogs, and are instead being sucked into the same far-left, strident, potty-mouthed, anti-mainstream world. This is disastrous for them because, as a Democracy Corps poll shows, even while Republicans are tanking, Democrats are doing even worse.

My reaction to this not complex. I find Barnett's view of political organization to be overly linear, short-sighted, and either ignorant or purely dishonest. To address the last part first, it is either ignorant or dishonest because he either does not know that the vast majority of fundraising for the Democratic National Committee now comes form small online donors such as the type who read blogs, or he is somehow under the delusion that politicians of every persuasion have not, for decades, always tried to perform behind the scenes wooing of resource-providing activists who tend to be of the strident variety. Of course the Democratic Party is going to try and woo its new donor base--has any other party ever acted any differently? The number of people who read blogs may not be very high by the standard of the 2004 presidential election, but considering that around 80% of them donate to political campaigns and their average income is around 77K, a few hundred thousand of those people are extremely worth wooing. To do otherwise would be to not run an effective political organization, and to think otherwise is to simply be naïve, ignorant or dishonest.

To move onto the issue of size, well, yes, there are only about 650,000 readers of Dailykos on weekdays, and that is not very large by standards of presidential elections. However, there are a lot more readers of liberal blogs than just readers of Dailykos. For example, the Liberal blog Advertising network registers over 14,000,000 page views per week (or rather it will in a day or two, since we are about to add someone very, very big), which translates to a rough estimate of around 1.8 million unique visitors on weekdays. That still isn't very significant in terms of actual voters, but keep in mind that the number has increased more than ten-fold in the past two years. That number will only continue to increase over the next few years, building up to a huge crescendo during the 2008 elections.

Even if it doesn't get dramatically larger, so what? Votes and persuasion are the indirect, rather than the direct, purpose of emerging progressive media, such as blogs. Alternative media exists instead to activate a base group of voters and build resources from that base group that will eventually allow a party or an ideology to have far more resources when they seek to persuade the politically indifferent swing voters in the future. Barnett is right--most of America does not spend much time thinking about politics. So why exactly should the Democratic party be concerned with motivating these indifferents in the summer of 2005, the ultimate dead-zone of electoral politics? As I argued two weeks ago, wooing the base and converting swing voters is not an either or proposition:

If Barnett can only conceive of a purely linear model of politics where the Democratic Party is either on its far left or trying to reach swing voters, he just isn't trying hard enough. Any successful, long-term strategy for either political party must require finding a way to utilize all members and potential members of its coalition , rather than just one part. There is nothing mutually exclusive about preaching to the choir and converting swing voters. In fact, I'm not even sure if it is possible to be successful at one without pursuing the other.

Finally, let me deal with the short-sighted part of what Barnett writes. There was a time when right-wing talk radio was small, and it was dismissed even by many people in the Republican Party as an unimportant bunch of extremist whackos. Now, however, many of them are mainstream media figures with enormous audiences that have a powerful effect on the national political discourse, not just the conservative political discourse (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.). As blogs and other forms of emerging progressive media continue to grow, they will eventually accomplish much of the same thing. Unless you can understand blogs as part of a long-term progressive strategy to help move the entire national political discourse and the national media discourse to the left, then I think you miss their real promise. Conservatives can deny that the ongoing rise of the lefty-netroots isn't important, just like Democrats denied the importance of rising right-wing media and grassroots in the seventies and eighties, but there once was a time not long ago when Democrats were the natural ruling party of this country. When that happens again, blogs such as Dailykos will have played a major role.