I Fear Huckabee and Other Blogger Laments
Along with MSNBC's Tom Curry, CNN's Jackie Schechner, the NYT's Matt Bai and a sprinkling of party operatives and interest group reps, The Note attended a regular meeting of the Internet Left at Townhouse Tavern in Dupont Circle on Sunday. Here is what we took away:
1. Mike Huckabee instills fear.
2. Hillary Clinton provokes scorn.
3. Russ Feingold inspires passion.
4. And John Edwards' early focus on poverty — coupled with Elizabeth Edwards' statement of support for Cindy Sheehan — is getting him a second look from this crowd.
How typical that the Kewl Kidz at The Note need to attend a DC gathering of bloggers to find out what the Internet Left really thinks. Bloggers' defining characteristic, after all, is that they write down every single passing political thought right on these here internets for everybody to see.
Or do they? This fear of Huckabee thing had me stumped. I haven't heard anything about it, but then it's always possible that the Internet Left is an exclusive club that someone such as I wouldn't know about. I thought I did. I even get the e-mails. I spend neurotic amounts of time scouring the blogs for the latest news and here I find out that there's a whole level of insight that apprently exists only at the elite personal Internet Left level.
So, left to my own out-of-it devices, I resorted to the outsider's friend, Mr Google, and I find out that Mike Huckabee is running for president (or acting a lot like he is, anyway.) Here's an editorial from the September 16, Arkansas Dem Gazette:
Having watched Mike Huckabee in action for nine years now, it’s clear the man has his priorities straightest when times are worst. The highlights of his career tend to coincide with lowlights: the day Jim Guy Tucker wouldn’t leave the governor’s post, the aftermath of 9/11, the ice storm, the 40 th anniversary of the Central High Crisis . . . .
Each time, Mike Huckabee stepped up. Big time.
How does he do it? It’s a simple formula, really: Do what’s right and worry about the bureaucratic red tape later. Or to quote Governor/still-Reverend Huckabee:
"What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? I’ll tell you what he’d do. He would try to make sure these needs were met."
This guy's running for president and he appears to have all the rhetorical gifts of George W. Bush without the gravitas (although he did successfully manage Arkansas' response to 9/11 and the 40th anniversary of the Central High Crisis Crisis so he's a proven leader. Big Time.)
Ok. I'm on board with the Inner Internet Left's fear of Mike Huckabee. Dear Gawd, save us.
Atrios has more today on the Karl Rove official fan club and fluffing society, otherwise known as The Note. This one's a killer:
The press and the Democrats are still demonizing Karl Rove's involvement in anything and everything, expressing shock and horror that a deputy White House chief of staff with wide-ranging applicable experience is helping to oversee the Katrina response.
Were the Kewl Kidz still tugging on their thongs at Club Med when the whole "Man Called Brownie" thing came down? Apparently so, or these astute observers of the political scene would notice that the optics of Bush putting his primo political advisor in charge of a massive reconstruction job might just look a little as if he's putting politics over competence --- again. But hey, there's no margin in taking on the Rovester, at least if you want to be invited to insider fetes where the great man freely speaks his mind off the record:
Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report.
On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...
On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...
On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...
On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...
On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don't really understand...
On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass...
In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.
We have the president's top advisor and political machine builder speaking before this group of media elites, all of whom are sworn to secrecy. We hoi polloi wouldn't know anything about this if it weren't for a wee whistelblower who told Arianna. Can we all see the problem here folks? (Hint: it ain't partisanship.)
Which brings me to this very intriguing article in this week's LA Weekly. Read it all, but this passage was particularly on point:
If big media look like they’re propping up W’s presidency, they are. Because doing so is good for corporate coffers — in the form of government contracts, billion-dollar tax breaks, regulatory relaxations and security favors. At least that wily old codger Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, parent company of CBS, has admitted what everyone already knows is true: that, while he personally may be a Democrat, “It happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”
I don't know how many of you have worked for a corporation, but those of you who have know what that means. If you want to make it in a big organization you listen when the big bosses say things like that.
Whoever wrote that little blurb on The Note about Karl Rove (this past week-end's marquee entertainment for all the movers and shakers in Big Media) knows that his or her corporate bosses believe that Republicans are better for business --- and they will appreciate any employees who recognise that corporate priorities are career makers. None of this has to be stated out loud. Any ambitious journalist who wants to sit at Tom Friedman's table knows what to do without even being told. Indeed, he knows what to do without even consciously thinking about it. It's the way the world works.
And as for the people listening to Uncle Karl regale them with delicious little tidbits about which they can only talk to other privileged establishment players and courtiers, well let's just say that I cannot help but laugh out loud at the notion that they are committed to truth --- or even reality. Indeed, it seems to me that we are living in entirely different worlds. They are not custodians of democracy, they are insider usurpers of it.
This is not to say that blogs are the answer to our woes. I recognise that blogs (such as Time's blog of the year just today) are living in an echo chamber of a different sort --- as do many of us on the left. But, I think we are, or have been, a populist voice which is at this point a very necessary counterpoint to the effete, arid babble of the insider cognoscenti. There is, at least, some fresh air to breathe in the blogosphere.
Peter Daou has written an extremely interesting piece that speaks to this today in which he reveals some of his travails as someone who tried to explain the emerging power of the netroots to the staid strategists of the Kerry campaign. Among other things, he concluded that blogs need to engage the mainstream media and the party structure in order to influence the conventional wisdom.
Should we conclude, then, that the inability of bloggers on the left and right to alter or create conventional wisdom means that they have negligible political clout? If the netroots can’t change CW without the mass media and the political establishment, and if the mass media and the political establishment can change CW without the netroots (which seems undeniable), then isn’t the blog world a relatively powerless echo chamber? The answer, of course, is no.
Bloggers can exert disproportionate pressure on the media and on politicians. Reporters, pundits, and politicians read blogs, and, more importantly, they care what bloggers say about them because they know other reporters, pundits, and politicians are reading the same blogs. It’s a virtuous circle for the netroots and a source of political power. The netroots can also bring the force of sheer numbers to bear on a non-compliant politician, reporter, or media outlet. Nobody wants a flood of complaints from thousands of angry activists. And further, bloggers can raise money, fact-check, and help break stories and/or keep them in circulation long enough for the media and political establishment to pick them up.
Consequently, bloggers, though unable to change conventional wisdom on their own, are able to use these proficiencies and resources to persuade the media and political establishment to join them in pushing a particular story or issue.
The blogosphere is full of calls to arms and polemics and analysis all of which are, to varying degrees, politically empowering. I've often said that we are the heirs to the revolutionary war era's pamphleteers, only in electronic form and I proudly number myself amongst them. But, like Peter, I think that the blogosphere's most important purpose at this point in its very new history is to serve as a check on the insular journalistic elites that make up the corporate media hierarchy and the DC beltway press. And I think we already do this in a couple of different ways, neither of which were invented by bloggers but which were made possible for the masses to participate in by technology.
I realize that he is long out of fashion and probably politically incorrect to evoke in these conservative times, but I think that bloggers can be, at our best, the heirs to IF Stone, who famously said that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because "you would never know on what page you would find a page one story." Like Stone, we are always looking for the page one story that's buried on page 15. Our capacity to use collective energy to scour newpapers and other publications for the small details that can lead to a bigger story is one of the innovations of blogging. We are using the modern investigative tools at our disposal to follow up on the "shirt tail hanging out" as he used to call it --- the little detail that leads one to delve more deeply into the story and get to the larger truth. Technology, of course, is key --- but so is the aggregate energy of thousands of individuals putting it to work.
And I also think we change the dialog in a way that's too subtle to measure but is vital nonetheless. While we were unable to influence the media prior to the Iraq war, our arguments, honed over the course of two years of non-stop writing, analysing and fist shaking, meant that when the tide of public opinion began to turn, the media and at least some members of the public had an understanding of events that they wouldn't have had if we had not been screaming into the void. I believe that the concentration of words that had been pushed into the ether helped opinion to move faster than it would have otherwise. And it prepared the press to finally admit what they saw with their own eyes when confronted with the Katrina cock-up.
Like Stone, who was an early skeptic of Vietnem, the bloggers of the left, operating outside any party hierarchy and completely outside the establishment, were the earliest off the mark on the debacle that has become Iraq. We were skeptical because we weren't immersed in the conventional beltway wisdom that said we had to support the war. Unlike those who were angling for jobs or social approbation or credibility among the beltway elites, we just said what we thought. There is value in that.
We outsiders can probably be the worst cynics around --- but I would say that when it comes to power, we are far more likely to be right than wrong. As Stone said, "If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie."
For structural reasons as much as anything, the blogosphere is filling a void that IF Stone's retirement left unfilled during those long years in which the right built up its media infrastructure. We are telling the truth as we see it. That's not to say that it is always a pure and clear reflection of reality. But it is, at least, authentic and sincere which is something that one cannot say about the media elite or the climbers who aspire to it. There is value in that too.
In other blogging news:
EvolveTV, which many of my readers have asked me about about, and about which I knew absolutely nothing, is done teasing and has announced its intentions. It looks to be a lot of fun -- a streaming TV show featuring all your favorite bloggers like Atrios, Kos, Juan Cole, PZ Myers etc. Check it out.
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