Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 4:15 pm Post subject: Dean Barnett: "The Electoral-Based Community" |
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Like junkies, prominent Demos flock to the relatively obscure blogworld to satisfy an incessant need for short-term (and, ultimately costly) political ego fixes... (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | The Electoral-Based Community
Why the rise of the left-wing blogosphere has been bad for the Democratic party.
by Dean Barnett
The Daily Standard
07/15/2005
<snip>
WHILE THE FURY SPEWED AT DURBIN is out of place in mainstream political discourse, it represents business as usual in the most prominent precincts of the left-wing blogosphere. Of course, left-wing blogs do not have a monopoly on offensive and vitriolic rhetoric--the right also has its crank bloggers, too.
Yet only Democratic politicians have concluded that "their" blogs somehow represent a new norm. As left-wing blogs have become ascendant, the left's politicians have become increasingly strident and bilious.
How has this strategy been working? Disastrously. The last six months have been a horror show for Republicans. And yet, astonishingly, the Democratic party has suffered more in the polls than the Republicans. According to a recent poll done by Democrats Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, 43 percent of Americans have warm feelings for the Republican party compared to 38 percent who feel the same way for Democrats. Greenberg characterizes his poll's results this way: "Republicans weakened in this poll . . . but it shows Democrats weakening more." Greenberg says the Democrats' fall is due to voters feeling that the party has "no core set of convictions or point of view."
Why is that? The Democratic party has decided to imitate the style of the political blogs, even though the most trafficked one, the Daily Kos, receives fewer than 600,000 visits a day.
While the traffic numbers of the Daily Kos are a great accomplishment, even 600,000 readers (a generous estimate) are nearly insignificant from a national electoral perspective. And while Kos's readers represent a constituency which prefers a steady diet of heated rhetoric and non-stop Bush bashing, there is nothing to suggest that a larger movement is developing with a similar taste for bare-knuckled, obscenity-laced politics.
As Markos Moulitsas observed (dKos proprietor/me#1), his virtual community is a "different world." Democrats seem to have forgotten that elections are held in the real one.
Dean Barnett writes about politics and other matters at soxblog.com
The Daily Standard - cont'd
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hattip: Hugh Hewitt |
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