| Well, well. The YearlyKos is getting quite a lot of press. The Democratic presidential candidates' appearance at the convention is creating quite a stir among the traditional media. (A sort of strange occurrence if you consider the lack of coverage for, say, Republican candidates appearing at the National Right to Life Conference.) Combine that with crazy Bill O'Reilly's crusade against the convention, its sponsors, and the politicians who'll make appearances there (here's Bill getting reamed by Dodd about Kos), and we've got a perfect media storm around the convention and its members.
That's great news!
Unlike far-right Republican political strategy sessions (Norquist's secret "Wednesday Meetings," for example) which are often held behind closed doors, the YearlyKos is open to the public. Anyone can go! And for the same reason that Norquist's meetings are secret: scrutiny. Norquist doesn't want it; lefty bloggers do. |
| Take Hendrik Hertzberg's report on the convention in the The New Yorker:
I admit that I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked...
No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No "sweet smell of marijuana," as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically.
Hertzberg's explanation for this is that the event that galvanized the left 'sphere - the Iraq War - is a "Republican" conflict. So, to oppose, you don't have to go left of the Democratic Party.
I think Hertzberg misses the mark a little. Kevin Drum gets it:
What's happening now isn't a youth revolt, and it's not powered by free love, free acid, or fear of being drafted. It's powered by a lot of bog ordinary moderate liberals who have been radicalized by George Bush and the Newt Gingrichized Republican Party. I think a lot of journalists (though I don't mean to include Hertzberg here) don't quite get this because they haven't internalized just how far off the rails the modern Republican Party has gone. Until they do, they're going to continue to misunderstand what's happening.
I'd hasten to add that the youth are decidedly with us on this venture, and that Web 2.0 - interactive Internet technology, like blogging - gives them more influence on the shape and direction of our revolution than a generation has ever had before. (Yes, that's a challenge to you 60s activists!)
I think that's why media scrutiny of the event is welcome. The traditional media will encounter the hinterland, and realize it's the lefty bloggers who best represent the moderate center of this country, not the radical conservative activists who the Republican party and AM radio have elevated beyond their station. What else can journalists say after they meet mostly middle-age bloggers toting mortgages and kids and 5-figure jobs?
This may surprise some, but we're not radical extremists. We're ordinary people.
Matt Yglesias is sort of taken aback by how successful the Netroots have been and how quickly the "establishment" have absorbed us in:
Not that anyone didn't know this already on some level, but it really was striking to get the visual of yesterday's gate crashers quite literally mingling with the dread establishment at a cocktail party. The question that nobody seems to know the answer to, though, is whether the revolution ended because the revolutionaries won, or because they sold out? The boring, but probably boring-because-accurate, answer is that it's a little of both.
While I think it's a bit early to proclaim the gates crashed - today's FISA bill shows that there's a lot of work to be done - this isn't surprising. We bloggers are in the mainstream and we just want to participate in the system, not overthrow it.
For now. |
