From The Back Of The Bus
by digby
I've been meaning to give a shout out to Eric Boehlert's book Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
for quite some time, but for a variety of reasons, have been remiss. I enjoyed the book, but also felt tremendous reticence about writing anything because I'm featured in the book and I really hate any kind of attention to my personal life. (I'm also not crazy about how I sound in interviews --- I need to work on that.)
The book is an interesting, insider view of the blogs and how they impacted the last presidential campaign. I would guess that one reason it hasn't gotten more attention is because most of the left blogosphere is still healing from the Democratic primary and so is not particularly excited about re-opening those wounds. (There are some bloggers who created entire communities around that fight, however, so the book has been welcomed with open arms in some quarters.)
The book hits some particularly emblematic moments and events during the long presidential campaign that changed the blogosphere, some of which even I was unaware, like the battle over who owned the Obama MySpace page. I'm still not convinced that the blogosphere itself impacted the campaigns much, except to the extent that the campaigns took the blogosphere for granted or went around it altogether. The book sheds some light on how that happened, but I'm not sure we have the whole picture. One thing is obvious: the blogs became campaign partisans rather than movement players and that's probably the reason the campaigns didn't bother with us. We demanded nothing and we got nothing.
Among the remaining Clinton supporters in the blogosphere today, my own role seems to have been reduced to one sentence in which I characterized myself as a chickenshit for failing to post about the MSNBC hosts' RFK assassination accusations, which I believed at the time to be way over the top and truly outrageous. I was tired and just didn't have it in me to wage that fight at that point. This has been construed among the die hard Clinton people as some sort of grand mea culpa for failing to support Clinton generally, which was not the intention of my comment at all. To be perfectly clear I didn't, and still don't, believe that I was wrong for refusing to take a side in that online wrestling match and I openly declared my reasons from the very beginning:
A lot of criticism has come my way recently because I won't "endorse" anyone and this has led to people making assumptions about my position. But the truth really is that I am not invested in any of the candidates. They are nearly identical in terms of policy, all have political gifts and bring something to the table and I find none of the various electability arguments particularly persuasive. Indeed, I believe that the fact they are so similar in all the important ways is one of the reasons everyone is at each other's throats on this --- since there's no daylight on policy everyone is having to argue their case based on their own emotional connection to the candidate or what the candidate symbolizes, which often devolves into ugly invective. It really does become personal under those circumstances. You can see the result of this in the candidates' own debate last night. They weren't really fighting over anything important because they don't actually disagree about anything important. But they had to fight. It's an election. Somebody's got to win.
Unlike many of you, all things being equal in the policy and electability department, I don't actually believe that Edwards' "fighting working man spirit" or Obama's "post-partisan vision" or Clinton's "hard knuckled experience" are going to be the determining factor in the success of progressive politics. I think change is going to come from the ground up not the top down, from a progressive movement that has positioned itself to leverage ANY candidate.
I agree with Robert Borosage, who wrote this piece, It Takes A Movement:
The lesson of the King years isn't a choice between rhetoric and reality, or between experience and change. The lesson of the King years is the vital necessity of an independent progressive movement to demand change against the resistance of both entrenched interests and cautious reformers.
Since I have no dog in this primary fight (although I will join the fray in earnest once the nominees are chosen --- beating Republicans is job one) I'm staying out of the daily back and forth between the candidates on the campaign trail (and in the blogosphere.) But I am challenging media storylines and destructive village behavior and trying to influence progressive rhetoric and strategy.
I've been closely following the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton in the press --- I always monitor the media narratives and this one was indisputably powerful and instructive. (Eric Boehlert has a column up about The Tweety Effect today.) And I've also been critical of some of Obama's post-partisan rhetoric because I just disagree with it as a matter of strategic principle, even as I understand why he is doing it. Those two things seem to have led readers to believe that I am a biased, possibly paid, closet Clinton shill, which is what turned the comment section into a war zone.
As I said, I'm invested in none of these candidates, I'm invested in progressive politics, which none of them are speaking to very directly. But then we are only beginning to develop the language and themes for them to use to do that. (I do have some hope that whoever is elected will hear us, however.) And I'll keep watching the village and the media and pointing out their arcane mores and rituals because that's ... what I do.
The irony, of course, is that at the time I was being beseiged by angry Obama supporters who were convinced that I was agitating for Clinton while today I remain the object of many delightful insults from the Clinton true believers for failing to do just that. One would hope that at least a few people took me at my word, but I honestly don't know.
That decision became a sort of Rorshach test among hyper partisans on both sides and I came to understand that within these inter-tribal battles, it's less about who you take sides with than who you take sides against. Hating the same people, not likeing the same people, is the point.
As I wrote in that post, I understood why people came to identify so closely with the candidate of their choice and why it became so personal. I simply don't feel that way about politicians. Somewhere along the line, I developed a skepticism about all of them that makes it impossible for me to fall in love with any of them. When a campaign depends upon developing a personal attachment, as this one did, I'm just not on the same wavelength.
I suppose most people will always see that race through the lens of their own decision. I know I will. And I honestly have zero regrets. The blogospheric hysteria notwithstanding, the race was not particularly dirty by historical standards and it ended up essentially in a tie, and for good reason --- the two candidates were veritable twins separated only by the symbolism of their historic candidacies and the personal identification of their followers. And that's what ended up being interesting --- and maddening --- about the race.
Boehlert's book hints at all that, and certainly covers the primary war during the heat of the battle. But the book ends with a sort of impression that it was all over, and yet among certain corners of the blogposphere, it still rages as brightly as if it were the spring of 2008. Maybe if he does a paperback version, he could add a post script about that.
I feel a bit sorry for Eric, who surely wrote this book believing that the blogosphere would be interested in reading all about themselves and instead found that we were still too shell shocked to want to revisit the period. If I were the publisher, I'd look to reissue it before the next campaign, when I suspect that it would find a larger audience. It's one of the first histories written of this little blogospheric project of ours and it will surely be one that people will use in the future to chart the rise of the progressive movement.
The 2008 campaign showed us to be politically immature and easily subject to the bad habits of horserace coverage and petty tabloid proclivities of the mainstream media when the conditions are right. But I also think it was mostly a matter of growing pains and that much was learned from the experience. I know I learned a lot and will undoubtedly use Boehlert's book as a reminder when I start to forget those lessons.
*All of my posts are there in the archives for anyone who wants to see what I actually wrote during the primaries. Not that I expect that a re-reading of them will settle anything. Most people have long since settled into their position and I don't expect it to change at this point. But there might be a few stragglers who have only recently become convinced of my cowardice who would be surprised at what they see.
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