Bookplanet: the big new book by the most powerful Democratic bloggers

The Hope of the Web
By Bill McKibben
Book reviewed: Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, with a foreword by Simon Rosenberg (Chelsea Green, 216 p)

1.

When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.

The site, which draws more than half a million visits each day, [1] has emerged as a meeting place for a great many ordinary people (i.e., not only politicians, journalists, academic experts, issue advocates, or big donors) who want to revive the Democratic Party. Obsessed with developing strategies for defeating Republicans, the site was much involved with the campaign of Howard Dean for the presidential nomination and carrying on his forthright opposition to the Iraq war. Its sophisticated technological structure, assembled by Moulitsas, has allowed its viewers to raise money for favored politicians, rethink and debate issue positions, harass lazy or ideologically biased journalists and commentators, and even help break stories that the mainstream press managed to overlook. In doing so, it has explicitly tried to chart a new future for the Democrats—the subject of the book under review—and implicitly suggested new possibilities for the American political system that might help it break free of the grip of big money. It also raises large questions about the future of journalism. In my view, nothing more interesting has happened in American politics for many years.

The birth of the new movement led by Daily Kos came in 2003 with the unexpected emergence of Howard Dean as a presidential candidate. Since that campaign provided both the technological and spiritual inspiration of much that came later, it's important to reconsider what Dean's venture was (and was not) about. It rose in the shadows of the Bush ascendancy in the years following September 11, when very few people—certainly not presidential candidates with an eye to getting elected—were willing to challenge the White House directly. In that situation, Howard Dean's forthrightness, especially his willingness to strongly oppose the war in Iraq, united many people worried that Bush had succeeded in stifling dissent.

But it's also important to realize that Dean wasn't particularly liberal. In his years as governor of Vermont he'd earned a reputation as a moderate in social and fiscal policy, addressing health care for children, for instance, but frustrating local activists by refusing to take up a more comprehensive medical plan. Bernie Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington who is now the only independent member of the House of Representatives, is a Vermont liberal. Dean is not. What mattered in Dean's case was his open manner and his willingness to risk making clear statements about Iraq. In their book, Armstrong and Moulitsas—who are widely known on the Internet by their shorthand names Jerome and Kos—retell the story of the campaign's early days, especially Dean's speech to the California Democratic Party in March 2003. He followed the well-known candidates, who trimmed and tacked:

The crowd, a few thousand of the party diehards, was getting a close look at the men seeking the Democratic nod, and not liking what it saw.
And then Howard Dean walked on stage.
"What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention in Iraq?"
That brought loud cheers from the delegates.
"What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting tax cuts which have bankrupted this country and given us the largest deficit in the history of the United States?"
Soon the crowd was chanting "Dean, Dean," and that was before he unleashed his signature line: "I want my country back! We want our country back! I'm tired of being divided! I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore! I want America to look like America, where we are all included....We have a dream. We can only reach the dream if we are all together— black and white, gay and straight, man and woman. America! The Democratic Party!"

The crowd, they write, "was on its feet, the convention hall shaking from audience pandemonium, the speech serving as a liberation of sorts." Party activists "weren't alone in the fight. Not anymore. They had a champion and his name was Howard Dean. The call to arms by Dean was ideologically agnostic, purely partisan." And in that partisanship, it launched a movement that outlasted his ill-fated campaign and is still gathering strength.

What wasn't clear at the time was that the Dean campaign also launched the Internet era in American politics. Previously, even if people became excited about a candidate in the primaries, there wasn't all that much they could do to help. They might find a mailing address and send a check, or wait for the primary campaign to reach their state so they could take part in the campaign and then vote. But Dean's young campaign staff opened a new channel through their Web site Deanforamerica.com, which featured the then still fresh idea of a blog. Every few hours—sometimes every few minutes—staffers would file news from the campaign on its Web site: chatty and informal bulletins about how many people were gathering for a rally, short profiles of particular volunteers, digital pictures of clever signs supporters hung from highway overpasses or stuck in their front yards.

The staff used Meetup.com, an otherwise apolitical Web site designed to bring together groups of people with similar interests, to enable supporters in particular parts of the country to easily organize monthly meetings in church basements and high school gyms, where volunteers could, for example, write individual letters to every Democrat in Iowa and New Hampshire urging a vote for Dean. Most important of all, they pioneered on-line money-raising. Every time something unusual happened (when some pundit would disparage the "kiddie corps" running the Dean show, say) the Web site staffers would "put up a bat" on the home page—a picture of a baseball bat, empty like a United Way thermometer in front of a town hall, which they would fill with red as the contributions would come in from people taking a few minutes to read the blog from their home or office computers. The supporters of the Dean campaign easily raised more money than their opponents in the early primaries and caucuses, and for the first time in recent political history, they did it largely with $20 and $50 and $75 contributions from across a large base of his ardent fans. Suddenly ten thousand people with passion and $100 apiece could match a big PAC or a patio full of Hollywood stars.

The reason the Dean campaign collapsed in Iowa, the authors argue persuasively, was largely that the new kind of campaign he was assembling threatened so many powerful people, from rich donors used to the kingmaking power their money gave them to "media advisers" unhappy at seeing their conventional wisdom ignored. Jerome and Kos tell the story of the series of TV ads that helped turn the polls against Dean; they were sponsored by a mysterious new group called Americans for Jobs and Healthcare and they showed, among other things, the face of Osama bin Laden in order to argue that "Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy." A few months later when mandatory financial reports finally emerged, it turned out that the ads had been financed by supporters of John Kerry and Richard Gephardt and organized by the "disgraced, corrupt former New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli." All in all, the backers of the ad had given more than $8.7 million to the Democratic Party in the previous few years. Dean made plenty of political gaffes on his own but he had been eliminated by powerful Democrats.

What is striking, however, is that most of his supporters didn't desert the Democratic Party after his defeat. Instead, when the Dean campaign Web site went dark a great many shifted over to Daily Kos and they started to volunteer for John Kerry— not with the same affection they'd felt for Dean, but with much dedication. I spent the week before the general election in Columbus, Ohio, and virtually everyone I talked to who was out knocking on doors for Kerry had begun the year supporting either Dean or the other Internet favorite, General Wesley Clark.

And many of them didn't drop out when Kerry lost the election, either. Instead, they concentrated on Dean's race for chairman of the Democratic Party, a post that had in recent years been mainly of interest to political insiders. The incumbent, Terry McAuliffe, retired after his failure in the 2004 elections, and the general consensus was that the 447 voting members of the relevant party committees would turn to yet another veteran of the inbred and centrist world of Democratic Party technicians, bland pols, and full-time fund-raisers. Jerome, on his widely followed MyDD blog (where Kos had begun his blogging career by posting comments), started handicapping the race; other bloggers began to study the records of Dean's rivals. One of them, Leo Hindery, for instance, was a prototypical fat cat. According to Crashing the Gate , he turned his Gulfstream around in midair while en route to a Democratic caucus when he learned that the blogs had revealed he was a chief backer of the ad linking Dean and Osama. When Dean eventually won, he said, "This party's strength does not come from consultants down. It comes from the grassroots up." In essence, this new force had lost the primary, but made it clear that it could continue to fight. "Dean was the first to break through and get inside the heretofore closed world of the party," Kos and Jerome write. "He won't be the last."

Crashing the Gate concentrates on the tactics for a new Democratic strategy. These include, first, shifting power away from single-issue advocacy groups, like the abortion rights movement, environmentalists, and labor unions, and toward a revived Democratic Party itself. Such groups have long been the main constituency of many Washington Democrats, sources for both money and volunteers, and as a result they have been able to impose on the party their own orthodox approaches to important issues. It is true that such groups as NARAL—the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League—and the Sierra Club join pro-Democratic electoral coalitions such as ACT UP and MoveOn.org. But the trouble, as the authors point out, is that giving prominence to such groups seems to confirm Republican stereotypes ("treehuggers"). Worse, the activists concerned with single issues cannot reliably deliver electoral victories. Often their efforts are simply counterproductive. In May 2005, for instance, NARAL endorsed Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee for reelection this fall because he said he was pro-choice. On the other hand, as Jerome and Kos point out, he voted to make the militantly anti-choice Bill Frist Senate majority leader, and he sided with the Bush administration on the crucial vote on a filibuster against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

By contrast, Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader in the Senate, says he is personally against abortion —but he has still resisted many of the federal judges opposed to abortion the Bush administration has proposed during his tenure. (Reid will be the keynote speaker when the Kos community, who sometimes call themselves "Kossacks," holds their first convention in which they will physically meet this June in Las Vegas.) Kos and Jerome are also eager to see Democrats break with some of their past positions in order to reach new voters—Dean's stand against gun control as governor of a rural state appealed to them, for instance, and they've found a politician they can admire in Brian Schweitzer, Democratic governor of the red state of Montana, who favors a number of liberal reforms but also backed the program of the National Rifle Association.

Their point is that the Republicans have prospered by ignoring ideological consistency. They've held together a disparate coalition that ranges from right-wing evangelists and other promoters of conservative moral values to big businesses dependent on federal subsidies and tax cuts, each of whom realize they will get more of what they want by cooperating in joint efforts. A Democratic majority in the House and Senate would protect abortion rights even if individual senators were wobbly on the issue. "No one's narrow agenda is served by being in the minority," they write. "A governing majority would mean far more for everyone's pet causes. Let the party be the party, with the movement outside looking in." They represent, to use Dean's favorite applause line, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

Jerome and Kos also want to end the reign of the Washington-based political consultants who, they insist, have lost dozens of campaigns and squandered hundreds of millions of dollars. Their exhibit A is Bob Shrum, who had already managed, and lost, seven Democratic presidential campaigns when he was hired to run John Kerry's in 2004. They especially dislike the Beltway consensus that Democrats should concentrate on the states where they hold an advantage. Along with Dean, they advocate a fifty-state strategy, arguing that the party can build national momentum by contesting even impossible districts, identifying new Democratic voters, and encouraging them to contribute money and campaign work along the way.

Many of the bloggers who are in touch with Jerome and Kos have become self-taught experts on such topics as polling and focus groups. One point they make is that many campaign managers are simply buying TV time in order to enrich their own consulting firms, which charge as much as 15 percent of every dollar spent on ads. Jerome and Kos argue for a variety of different approaches, including sophisticated database technology that would enable Democrats to approach, for example, registered Republicans whose families may be suffering from Parkinson's disease and would be open to an appeal to support stem cell research. And they want campaigns better able to take advantage of the potential campaign workers who can be mobilized by the Web sites—people willing to spend an hour every few evenings, say, using excess cell-phone minutes to call potential swing voters in close congressional races halfway across the country. On every front they're eager to wrest control from the well-connected, Ivy-educated Washington Democratic elite, arguing that it is out of touch with the larger body politic.

They also aim to come up with a core message about the Democratic Party, and what it means, that will compete successfully with the GOP's ideas of national security, limited government, lower taxes, and "moral values." They favor a broad, economic populist message, emphasizing issues like improvements in Social Security, much-expanded health care, and fairer taxes. After they toured Governor Schweitzer's ranch in Montana, and passed up the chance to shoot prairie dogs, "We asked him what he would want to hear if people on the street were asked about the Democratic Party. Schweitzer paused for a bit, then responded with conviction, 'They are the party on our side.'"

In its account of the political possibilities of the Internet, Crashing the Gate seems to me the most ambitious, interesting, and hopeful venture in progressive politics in decades. It's not a model that will win overnight. Kos picked a dozen Democratic challengers, most in quixotic races against heavy favorites like Tom DeLay, to raise money for in 2004, and all of them lost. But as he points out, it took patient work for the Republican right to build up its strength after the Goldwater debacle of 1964. And indeed, in the eighteen months since Kerry's defeat, Web activists have tested the new approaches in special elections with some successes. One example came during last August's election for a seat in Ohio's 2nd District, a Republican stronghold since 1974, which Bush carried in 2004 with 64 percent of the vote. Normally the Democrats would barely have bothered contesting the seat, but Paul Hackett, a political novice recently returned from a tour as a Marine Corps major in Iraq, launched just the kind of antiwar campaign the on-line activists had been urging: he was, the authors write, "boldly outspoken, unafraid of taking the battle to Republicans." Asked about gay marriage, he said: "Gay marriage—who the hell cares? If you're gay, you're gay—more power to you. What you want is to be treated fairly by the law and any American who doesn't think that should be the case is, frankly, un-American." The Internet activists raised $500,000 of the campaign's total $850,000 budget—nine thousand people giving an average of a little more than $50 apiece. On election day, the word went out at 10:30 in the morning that Hackett needed $60,000 for get-out-the-vote expenses, and six hours later $60,000 had poured in. The on-line activists had to tell people to stop giving.

In the end, Hackett came astonishingly close to winning; his opponent, Jean Schmidt, won by only 3.5 percent, which Newt Gingrich said was a "wake-up call to Republicans." A more threatening postscript for the GOP may have come this winter when Beltway Democrats forced Hackett out of his next race, for the Ohio Senate seat now held by Republican Mike DeWine, to make room for a candidate, Sherrod Brown, they thought had a better chance of winning. There was much grumbling on the Web sites about dropping Hackett, but the majority opinion seemed to be: it's okay; we like Hackett, but we want to win, and Brown is both a loyal Democrat and an electable candidate.

Indeed, Crashing the Gate is all about winning. That's what animates the on-line activists—that's why the number of hits on the Web sites rises as elections approach. The issues aren't secondary, exactly, but there's a clear consensus that worrying about the fine points of policy is an empty exercise without real power, and that power comes from party unity.

It's threats to that party unity that really anger the Web activists. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, for instance, faces a primary challenge that was first given real prominence on Daily Kos and allied Web sites. Not because he isn't liberal on issues such as Social Security; but because he doesn't behave like a Democrat—he seems happy to go on the Sunday talk shows and praise the President for starting the Iraq war or criticize Democrats for being weak on national security. In a photo widely circulated on the Web, he was the first on his feet applauding the President's Iraq policy during this year's State of the Union address. Lieberman may well survive the primary challenge he faces from Ned Lamont, a high-tech entrepreneur and former newspaper editor who opposes the Iraq war, but it seems possible that if he is strongly challenged, this will affect his positions in the years to come.

2.

What gives Kos and Jerome credibility is less their solid and straightforward book than the Web community they've helped to inspire and build. It includes a series of literally interlinked sites, ranging from the enormous if somewhat predictable, such as MoveOn.org, partially financed by George Soros, to the tiny and tightly focused. A few are expert blogs on particular topics: the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, for instance, gives detailed accounts of the day's events in Iraq at his Informed Comment site, JuanCole.com. Others derive from more traditional journalism: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) employs a couple of full-time reporters to uncover and explain the latest developments in the Republican congressional scandals. Others are more traditional blogs (if "traditional" can be applied to a medium four or five years old). These include Eschaton (www.atrios.blogspot .com) and Firedoglake (www.firedog lake.com), where bloggers offer their take, hour by hour, on a wide range of news events as they happen over the course of the day. Bigger and better-funded sites such as the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) feature a variety of well-known journalists with partisan commentary on the issues of the moment. The site called Crooks and Liars (www.crooksandliars.com) presents selected video footage from newscasts and talk shows. Each of these sites, and the hundreds of others they link to, has its own personality; if there are qualities that unite them, they would include skepticism about government claims and a tone of cynical humor about the pretensions of the Bush administration.

At the center of this world, however, is Daily Kos, which because of its particular architecture, and the open spirit of its founder, has become an experiment in Web-style democracy. Kos himself posts a few blog entries every day. But each year he appoints five assistants who can post comments of their own on his front page. Many of these have become household names (albeit pseudonymous ones) in the blogging world—Meteor Blades or Armando are far more widely read than, say, The New Republic 's TRB, despite the magazine's hundred-year head start. (As a measure of comparative fortunes, The New Republic announced last month that its circulation had fallen by 40 percent in the last few years.) But anyone who joins Daily Kos—a free and painless process—is allowed to post "diaries"—really mini-essays—about particular topics at any time. As I write this, on a Monday morning in late February, there are dozens of new diaries posted within the last hour on such subjects as "The End of Medicaid Is Beginning" by chuckles1, or "Dangers Posed by IRS Secrecy" by redlami, or "Time for a Port Pivot" by AlphaLiberal.

To sort out this flood of information (and misinformation), the site allows members to read the diaries and then, by clicking a button, "recommend" them if they think they're important. The ones with the most recommendations appear at the top of the page—at the moment, for instance, "McCain: 100% Wrong on Everything" is the most widely recommended. Members can do more than recommend diaries —they can also comment on them, and hundreds often do, rebutting or correcting or adding to press accounts. The technology works remarkably smoothly, and it changes regularly as Kos and friends develop new software.

When we consider Kos's own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence. And the results can be impressive. A writer with the pen name (mouse name) Jerome à Paris, for instance, organized dozens of other Kossacks interested in energy policy to write an energy plan that I find far more comprehensive and thoughtful than anything the think tanks have produced. It's been read and reshaped by thousands of readers; it will serve as a useful model should the Democrats retake Congress and have the ability to move legislation. The blogs began as purely reactive and bloggers still spend much of their energy responding to the "mainstream media." But a kind of proto-journalism is emerging, and becoming steadily more sophisticated. If you want to understand (albeit with plenty of spin) the ins and outs of Scooter Libby's defense in the Plamegate trial, for instance, the place to go is Firedoglake.

Some of the discourse is less edifying, of course. There is much familiar and often tiresome ranting at the Bush administration, at intelligent design advocates, at Fox News. But much of that disappears when there are specific factual issues to be addressed. For instance, the site's commentators have become experts at monitoring the regular press and television for signs of rightward bias, and they respond en masse. When The Washington Post kept repeating the GOP's charge that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats as well as to Republicans, on-line activists assembled data and organized an overwhelming response, showing that Abramoff mainly worked with Republicans. This finding was soon picked up by the press and television and much less was heard about Abramoff's evenhandedness. Reporters long cowed by conservative charges of bias (as Michael Massing demonstrated in his recent essays on press coverage of Iraq [2] ) now find that they are getting closer scrutiny on the Internet. Since the liberals of the blogosphere are better organized, this is starting to have a balancing effect. Kos says he gets fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right-wing "blogosphere," where his biggest competitor is probably a site called Instapundit.com.

Since the Internet is a limitless virtual archive, it can quickly track down almost anything any journalist or politician has said and done in the last decade. Even when people try to make things disappear, someone in that huge throng of readers probably has a copy. When Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, helped lead the fight against Social Security privatization, he made good use of quotes from the reports in local newspapers of congressmen speaking to their constituents in small forums. He showed that pols were making reassuring statements to voters in their districts and then voting the other way on Capitol Hill. (He also helped track down photos of President Bush and Jack Abramoff.)

One testimony to the power of Daily Kos is the list of dignitaries who come to visit. Democratic superstars like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have posted diaries (and have gotten and have received criticism as well as praise). But the national attention it has been getting is not the most interesting part of the entire process. What is most striking is the way people are learning to use the technology to connect with on-the-ground reality. As mid-term elections approach, with the Republicans weakened for the first time in at least twelve years, the diaries on the Web increasingly become vehicles for raising money or recruiting volunteers. People post accounts of their efforts to revitalize local Democratic precinct headquarters and offer each other tips on how to build mailing lists. In some places, the party machinery has simply rusted away from years of neglect, even as the GOP, thanks to such strategists as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, has spent decades building an efficient vote-getting machine.

The Democratic Party organization has spent more than a generation coasting on the momentum it built up in the 1960s and early 1970s, and that momentum has been running out. But the Web sites linked to Daily Kos and their millions of users have been giving the Democrats a new charge. It would be premature to ascribe strong electoral power on a national level to these new voices—many millions of voters have never heard of them. But what seems most striking about the ever-louder Internet voices associated with Kos is that they share a strong desire to win, and new means to make that desire matter.

Notes
[1] The proper method for figuring out Internet traffic is a matter of heated dispute. Should you count a new visitor whenever he or she logs on to a site? Or should you tally the number of different pages that they click on within a site? What if, like many of the readers of Daily Kos, they return three or four times a day? In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, Moulitsas claimed a million different people a week stop by his site, which seems at least plausible. It's also enough for him to make an annual income that he estimates at between $70,000 and $80,000, much of it from the ads that appear on his site.
[2] Michael Massing, 'The End of News?' and 'The Press: The Enemy Within,' The New York Review , December 1 and 15, 2005.