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Mark Warner: Can't Buy Me Blog Love

Democrat Mark Warner flirted with a presidential run after his stint as Virginia's governor ended in 2005. The courtshop was costly at times, but it doesn't appear to have bought him all the love he had hoped from prominent Democratic bloggers.

Warner had barely announced yesterday that he wants to be the Old Dominion's next U.S. senator before Matt Stoller of Open Left attacked without restraint. He ridiculed Warner's online announcement video as "disgusting Lieberman-esque" (a reference to netroots nemesis Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.), derided Warner as a "centrist" and said he would be "a bad senator." Stoller accused Warner of getting rich by "honest graft" in the telecommunications industry and said "his foreign policy ideas on Iran and Venezuela are crazy."

Stoller even stooped so low as to direct a biting joke at former Warner Internet guru Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, where Stoller blogged until earlier this year. "But those were delicious chocolate fountains," Stoller said in recalling a lavish party Warner had thrown in 2006 to try to woo the netroots.

Fortunately for Warner, he has a strong fan base in the Virginia Democratic blogosphere. Lowell Feld of Raising Kaine, a site that helped elect now-Gov. Tim Kaine to replace Warner as governor in 2005 and to vault now-Sen. James Webb over former Republican Sen. George Allen last year, jumped to Warner's defense by attacking Stoller.

"With friends like this," Feld wrote of Stoller, "who needs enemies?" He said a Warner-Webb duo in the Senate would be "one of the best" and chastised Stoller for resurrecting the issue of Warner's big bash for bloggers last year.

Feld's entry prompted a retort from Chris Bowers, Stollers' co-blogger at Open Left (and former MyDD co-blogger). He predicted that Warner, like 2006 netroots heroes Webb and Jon Tester of Montana, "will vote against the majority of Democrats in the Senate far more often than many people online think."

The criticism that Warner generated from high-profile liberal bloggers on his Senate announcement day closely follows the start of the much broader, Stoller-led campaign against "Bush Dog Democrats" -- moderate Democrats in the House who don't vote the way bloggers like him demand. That effort, too, generated an outcry from state-based Democratic bloggers like Feld.

All of which points to the idea that the A-list bloggers who rose to prominence by fighting the establishment are quickly becoming the new establishment -- and as such they are being forced to do battle with a new generation of intraparty peasants with pixel-forks.

The Blogway Elite versus the New Netroots (need a better name for them): It's all very interesting to watch.

Posted by Danny | 10:09 AM

Comments

Being a Republican myself it all sounds good to me! Thank God for the far left bloggers and their influence. What better way to keep the electable Democrats off the stage!

(And thank goodness the far right blogs don't have a much power, Long Live Daily Kos!)

Right of Center | 09.14.07 05:21 PM

When will the netroots learn that vilify somebody is the worst way to drum up opposition against somebody. Especially when they're vilifying him for something other people admire him for?

First find a topic you and your audience can agree on, then you take on that.

Alan Kellogg | 09.14.07 06:32 PM

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