Blog politics
POLITICIANS OUT to control the Internet will surely suffer rude surprises.
It's the age of the virtual soap box. Just as self-proclaimed orators once stood on hand crates to pontificate, political bloggers sound off on websites. They post photographs and videos. They check facts, amplify fallacies, and hit with the force of a wrecking ball.
Howard Dean tapped the raw power of the Internet. When Senator John Kerry ran for president, he hired blogger Peter Daou to manage the campaign's Web communications. Last month, Hillary Clinton hired Daou for her 2006 reelection campaign, a bid to be reelected as New York's junior Democratic senator that could be a test run for the presidency in 2008.
On Daou's own blog, the Daou Report, he says he wants to expand Clinton's ``relationship with the netroots," the grass-roots community of bloggers. It's part of a larger effort to close the triangle between the political establishment, the mainstream media, and bloggers. Daou has useful experience in building common ground: His blog posts commentary from the left and right to establish a comprehensive conversation in one place.
But it'll take more than Daou's work for Clinton to close the triangle.
An early battle has been won: Bloggers have become a force to be reckoned with. Many mainstream journalists and readers are paying attention. The next step is harder: focusing blog content where it can help define the future. In both mainstream news and blogs, scandal gets attention: Just type Ann Coulter's name into Google's search engine.
It's more compelling and useful to read posts on issues such as ``Ed Wonk," an anonymous teacher whose blog can be found at educationwonk.blogspot.com/ on issues such as how Florida educators are skeptical of the No Child Left Behind Act and about violence crippling Baghdad University.
Blogs can help shift the conversation from here's-whom-we-hate to here's what the country needs in order to have 21st-century schools, hospitals, businesses, streets, and nursing homes.
One lesson of American politics is that opponents have to find common ground. Beating the other side into submission doesn't work; neither does waiting for the opposition to see the light.
Another lesson is that politics lags. It can take years for good ideas to become practiced policies. Blogs could do great good by pushing the establishment to shorten this wearying time-table.
The blogosphere has rough neighborhoods full of singeing criticism and fiction masquerading as fact. But, for the most part, blogs are a new frontier for public discourse. They matter. And they could matter even more.
