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August 15, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
The Online Curse Of Incumbency
Bloggers of all political persuasions hate "the establishment." If that wasn't clear before the Aug. 8 primaries, it certainly is now. Voters in Connecticut, Georgia and Michigan handed electoral pink slips to three members of Congress, and blogs were a factor in all three upsets.
The Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut, where netroots hero Ned Lamont defeated Sen. Joseph Lieberman 52 percent to 48 percent, generated the most attention. If blogs were published in newsprint instead of online, the Internet activists who fret about global warming would have consumed enough paper in writing about the Connecticut battle to destroy a rain forest.
But the role of blogs in defeating Lieberman went far beyond just ranting against him for his support of the Iraq war and other initiatives of President Bush. Bloggers were involved in the race from start to finish, as detailed by writer Ari Melber at The Huffington Post and The Nation.
Lamont met with at least one key blogger (Matt Stoller of MyDD) early in his campaign, later hired another (Tim Tagaris) away from the Democratic National Committee, and used a third (Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake) as a volunteer production editor for his first video blog. Bloggers helped raise more than $300,000 for him online. They also followed his campaign across Connecticut and swarmed his headquarters on Election Night.
Before the votes were counted, some top bloggers tried to downplay their role in aiding Lamont. And when Hamsher embarrassed the campaign by painting Lieberman in blackface, Lamont unconvincingly claimed, "I don't know anything about the blogs." Now that Lamont has won, though, bloggers are beginning to boast of their newfound power within the Democratic structure.
"[B]logs are now vital parts of the party, displacing the lobbyist-lawyers-operatives whose organs were The New Republic and The Washington Post editorial page, and whose power flowed through their alliances with insular state machines and bigwig journalists," Stoller wrote Wednesday.
Lieberman's status as a former vice-presidential and presidential candidate, the amount of personal wealth Lamont invested in his campaign, and the persistent blogging about the race helped keep most political eyes trained on Connecticut. But blogs also made their presence known in electoral skirmishes to points west and south.
"Everybody in the country knows who Joe Lieberman is," said Andrew Roth, the blogger at The Club For Growth. "... Since blogs were writing about him, the media was practically obliged to follow it."
What they didn't follow as closely was the mirror intraparty Republican battle between freshman Rep. Joe Schwarz and Tim Walberg in rural Michigan. Roth's group financially backed the conservative Walberg and also used its blog to solicit more donations and cover the race. RedState joined the fight late in the game, publishing "The Top Ten Reasons Joe Schwarz Must Go" -- and go he did, losing to Walberg 53 percent to 47 percent.
"The Walberg campaign was gracious with its time and let us do a podcast," said Erick-Woods Erickson, the CEO and managing editor of RedState. "We also raised some money for Walberg. Most of our time, however, was devoted to the drumbeat that Joe Schwarz is a liberal. And I think the voters believed it."
Unlike the Connecticut race, bloggers did not coordinate with the Walberg campaign, and Walberg had no blog of his own. Other than doing the RedState podcast, manager Joe Wicks said in a telephone interview that the campaign had no interaction with blogs and ran no blog advertisements. In fact, Wicks struggled to say much at all about blogs.
"It's nothing we were directly involved in," he said of their interest in Walberg. "It just sort of happened because of the excitement about the race."
Coordinated with the campaign or not, the blogging worked, and Liz Mair, editor of the moderate Republican blog GOPProgress, gave her online rivals their due. "The support for Walberg shown on sites like RedState probably offered his camp comfort as to their prospects and motivated them to continue their campaign efforts right up to the last minute, which obviously paid off," she said.
The results have Roth eager for the future. "I think there is a fantastic opportunity for The Club for Growth to work with the right-of-center blogosphere to find the Senate and House races that matter the most to fiscal conservatives and to cover them diligently," he said via e-mail. "Once we can do that, we can catch up to the netroots, which has a definite lead over us right now."
The third race where blogs rallied around a challenger and helped boot an incumbent occurred down in Georgia. That's where Democrat Hank Johnson handed Rep. Cynthia McKinney her second primary defeat in four years, trouncing her 59 percent to 41 percent in a run-off.
Johnson had the most unique blog strategy by far. He didn't embrace the blogosphere until after he finished second to McKinney in a three-way Democratic race July 18, but then he became the first candidate to post at Congress Blog. He also wrote for at least one other blog and bought ads on blogs from left to right to generate buzz and money about his candidacy.
"They've been effective in reaching out to the people who make the news, the people who determine what's hot and what's not ... and reaching the national media at an affordable price," Jonathan Ossoff, Johnson's deputy communications director, told National Journal's Technology Daily.
The outcomes in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia serve as a warning to incumbents across the political spectrum this election season: Enrage the blogosphere at your peril.
Posted by Danny | 07:07 AM
