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Blogging: How It Affects Partisan Politics.

Michael Barone, author of the indispensable Almanac of America Politics, perhaps the 3rd most astute observer of politics today (Karl Rove and Bill Clinton might be better), examines blogging and its effects on politics today, in the February 21 issue of U.S. News & World Report:

"The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans."

The article is worth reading in its entirety.

One point on which Barone could elaborate a bit more is the link between needing to raise political money and needing to play to the left hemisphere of the "blogosphere." [For those who are still new to blogging, "blogosphere" is just a term that describes all the blogs out there, and how they interact with one another; the world of blogging, if you will.] Barone notes:

"For 12 years, Democratic chairmen were chosen by Bill Clinton. He built a new generation of fundraisers who relished contact with the Clintons. Now the big money comes from the left blogosphere and Bush-hating billionaires like George Soros."

Democrats are addicted to internet cash. It's easy, it's fast, it's efficient. But the only way they can extract the requisite level of cash is by whipping an otherwise unlikely campaign/party contributor into an angry lather.

Political science research indicates that the general public takes cues from elites, with regard to ideology and ideas. Very few issues, even issues near-and-dear to the hearts of vast numbers of Americans, become prominent issues unless elites champion them.

What/who are elites?

Journalists, members of Congress, professors, presidential candidates, authors of books, celebrities, party leaders, lobbyists, judges, and even prominent bloggers- these are all examples of elites.

The party rank-and-file of both parties follow the party elites on policy, on tone, on everything. Over the past two years, leading Democrats have steered their party faithful down the road of extremism in order to extract enough resources (money, volunteer hours, votes, anger, etc.) to defeat George W. Bush.

They extracted more resources than ever before.

They still lost.

Bigtime.

But now Democrats are stuck with an angry base, entirely of their own creation. Liberal regions of the blogosphere are caught in a sort of self-perpetuating, self-sustaining cycle. The choice of Howard Dean as party chairman underscores the power of the liberal blogs within the DNC.

This shift to not just the far left, but the angry far left, ultimately helps the GOP capture the all-important middle.

Meanwhile, the emergence of the right blogosphere has not had an equal and opposite result on the Republican Party. Perhaps it will one day negatively affect the GOP, but not thus far.

Powerline has more thoughts here and here on the Barone piece.

Patrick Ruffini notes that right-leaning bloggers are unlikely to descend into madness the way left-leaning bloggers have:

"The blogroots candidates who raise money hand over fist online and inspire hundreds of fanblogs may also be the most electable.

This happy state of affairs is a product of two factors. The first is that conservative bloggers tend to be more pragmatic. But the second has little to do with how one approaches the ideological map more broadly. For conservative bloggers, the war on terror is the central organizing principle; spending and social issues tend to be secondary. That's in tune with where the country is, since the war on terror is the cement of our new majority; it's what enabled the President to win over pro-life Democrats in West Virginia while at the same time gaining the votes of pro-choice women in New Jersey who saw the billowing smoke on 9/11.

If conservative bloggers were to insist on nominating a candidate purely on the basis of fiscal conservatism or values issues -- at the expense of one with impeccable credentials on the war on terror -- then we would start venturing into the realm of strategic folly, which the Democrats have been wandering through ever since the 2000 election."

Posted by Will Franklin · 13 February 2005 02:10 PM

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