Meet the New Bosses

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TOOLS E-mail article Print article BACKTALK E-mail the editor RELATED ARTICLES Fight Different: Politics 2.0 Interviews with Bloggers, Politicos, and Netizens on Politics 2.0

John Byrne
rawstory.com
Any candidate is going to respond to a fundraiser, and a lot of these blogs are major fundraisers for the party. Not necessarily on the level that a Hollywood mogul is, but politicians respond to people who raise money. You don't want to alienate Kos or other big players because if you're on their good list, you're going to be able to raise more money.

Phil de Vellis
"Hillary 1984" creator
Before all this stuff, there were a few guys—guys like Joe Klein, David Broder, The Capital Gang—who could say if a campaign was run well or not. Now you've got millions of people essentially doing the same thing. So for candidates, talking to David Broder isn't a make-or-break thing. They can talk to Markos, or they could talk to local bloggers in Iowa. There are still gatekeepers. There are just a lot more of them, and new ones all the time.

Micah Sifry
It's true that Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas are very influential, but they are constantly held accountable by their audience. If Markos makes a mistake, right there in the blog comments people are bashing him. He can't stray that far from accountability, the way that editors of the old gatekeeping institutions—whether it was the New York Times or The Nation—were inherently insulated. It's no coincidence that you see a flowering of new voices and people earning their status on merit rather than going to the right college.

Nicholas Lemann
There is a constant struggle between these three models of politics: the group model, the party model, and the expert model. With the Internet you see a flourishing of group politics, which is healthy because it encourages civil society and ground-level participation.

esther dyson
It's not that you should necessarily do what the blogs tell you, but you need to prove that you are listening. Anyone who is good at running a company occasionally listens to the customer-support lines and gets a reality check, and that is what politicians should do. The best communications technology is the ear.

howard dean
The Internet is not just a tool, it is a community of human beings who are tired of what I call the "one-way campaign," which began essentially during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, where everything is on television. Well, it's not about communicating our message to you anymore; it's about listening to you first before we formulate the message.

Jane Hamsher
firedoglake.com
In this next election cycle, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama probably don't need the netroots behind them—they just need us not to hate them. But beyond 2008, they won't be able to marginalize the netroots, because it's not one blogger—it's not Markos, it's not Atrios—it's the way the base communicates with each other. The Democrats are still trying to play this Big Tent bullshit over a center that doesn't exist. As they wake up and smell the coffee, they'll realize they have to play to the base. The place the base goes to organize, get its opinions, is increasingly online.

henry jenkins
The blogosphere has done a really bad job in general of finding a common space between disagreeing parties. It probably does contribute to the further partisanization of American politics. Wikipedia represents the alternative model, one where people from different political backgrounds could work together. But it depends on the willingness of the candidates and the campaigns to try to come up with a purple strategy as opposed to a red-vs.-blue strategy.

bill wasik
creator of flash mobs
A lot of techno-utopian types—the kind of people who would crow about Politics 2.0-type stuff—they have a hammer, but they don't really know what their nail is. To me, the innovation of the netroots really has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with the way they're forging an aggressive vision of liberal politics.

glenn reynolds
When campaigns hire a blogger, they get a lot of expertise. But the glow wears off pretty fast. Everyone knows they're not independent anymore. Once I get an email from a blogger I know is working for a campaign, I treat it as campaign spam, because that's what it is.

Morra Aarons
blogher.com
There is an elite class of political bloggers who are on par with the pundits on the Sunday-morning talk shows. On the Democratic side, they seem to be largely male. When people think of women blogging, they think of mommy bloggers, right? But these women also talk and care about politics. I don't think that the small cadre of elite political bloggers are thinking about why there aren't more women in their ranks.

Jane Hamsher
I think it's a meritocracy. You have to put in the time to figure out how the blogosphere works. If you're willing to do that, I don't think being female is any barrier. In fact, I think it's an advantage at this point. The A-list bloggers are hungry and looking to give exposure to women who write really well. Most of those criticisms of male A-list bloggers shutting out women—I really don't have any other word to call it except just "bullshit."

glenn reynolds
Blogs have primarily been opinion outlets, and occasionally offered analysis that counted as news, like the typographical analysis of the Dan Rather National Guard memos. But I think we're going to see blogs come into their own as a true reporting medium between now and the election.

bill wasik
Look at what Josh Marshall has been doing on Talking Points Memo, where he'll tell his readers to call up their congressperson and find out if this person voted up or down in some voice vote where there is no record of it. Because they're supposed to tell their constituents how they voted, even if they wouldn't feel bound to tell journalists. There's radical potential in that.

10,000 Deaniacs

Where Are They Now?

Three years after Howard Dean's campaign put online outreach on the map, its alumni—and the netroots consulting firms they've helped spawn—are a fast-growing part of the political power structure. —Leigh Ferrara

Dean 2004 Campaign	→	Dean tech advisers Joe Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Clay Johnson, and Ben Self	→	Blue State Digital Clients: Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Ned Lamont, Al Franken
	→	DeanSpace creators Josh Koenig and Zach Rosen	→	Chapter Three Clients: Future Majority, Sunlight Foundation
	→	Dean Iowa vets Aaron Welch and Adam Mordecai	→	Advomatic Clients: John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Air America
	→	Webmaster Nicco Mele, Dean MeetUp head Michael Silberman, tech guys Justin Pinder and Harish Rao	→	EchoDitto Clients: Barack Obama, Jon Tester, SEIU, Bill Clinton
	→	Dean consultant and MyDD creator Jerome Armstrong	→	Digital Field Group Clients: John Kerry, Mark Warner, SEIU

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