Democratic rivals, bloggers meet on real-world turf

CHICAGO -- All but one of the Democratic presidential candidates came here yesterday to court the liberal blogosphere at YearlyKos, a convention that takes its quirky name from Daily Kos, one of the most muscular left-wing blogs.

Hillary Clinton, who during the YearlyKos-sponsored debate made a surprisingly spirited defense of taking lobbyists' money, even reversed her plan to skip part of the program in response to being booed.

Four of the top Democratic leaders in Congress were supposed to make the pilgrimage too, except they got stuck in Washington on official business. Meanwhile, Big Labor was busy wooing the crowd of 1,500 bloggers and activists, blanketing the convention hall with T-shirts and glossy fliers.

The "Netroots," as the progressive blogging community has dubbed itself, has in only a couple of years become a major force in electoral politics, able to influence what gets covered in the media, raise money, and whip up partisan outrage. The candidates who flocked here yesterday had last weekend spurned the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that helped elect Bill Clinton.

And yet, even amid projections about how well Democrats will do in 2008, there was a palpable sense of uncertainty about how to harness all the energy, enthusiasm, and anger to any particular effect, especially as far as the 2008 presidential election goes.

The Netroots helped the Democrats take back Congress last year. Yet the presidential candidate they championed in 2004, Howard Dean, failed miserably. And their antiwar candidate for Senate in Connecticut, Ned Lamont, lost last fall even after defeating longtime incumbent Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic primary.

At a forum called "Ned Lamont for Senate: What really happened," Lamont's campaign manager, Tom Swan, quipped, "I actually spent the better part of the last nine months trying to forget what happened."

None of this season's Democratic presidential candidates have lit the blogosphere on fire the way Howard Dean did in 2004. Clinton's vote to authorize the war in Iraq puts her on the outs with bloggers. Barack Obama's efforts to appear bipartisan have dampened enthusiasm for him.

John Edwards is the favorite here -- although not by that much -- for his liberal platform and his heavy use of the Internet. He told the crowd that his wife, Elizabeth, would be his official White House blogger.

Edwards got many people on their feet at the debate when he pushed, twice, for the other candidates to join him and Obama in vowing to take "not a dime" from lobbyists.

Asked if she would take up the offer, Clinton got off to a decidedly awkward start when she said, slowly, "I think that's a position . . . that John . . . certainly takes." When she added that nobody seriously thinks she will be influenced by lobbyists, the crowd booed.

But Clinton was just warming up. "A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans, they actually do," she said. "They represent nurses, they represent social workers, and, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people."

It wasn't a popular answer, but some said they appreciated her being so direct. In fact, many bloggers and activists here seemed most concerned with making sure the candidates paid their respects, not in particular policies.

"We are the Iowa and the New Hampshire of the Internet," said John Miller-George, a computer programmer in Napa, Calif., who posts on Daily Kos under the name LeftyLimblog. "We are retail politics. This is the same as a town of 1,500 people in New Hampshire."

Most of those interviewed said they had not picked their candidate yet.

"We're really glad they're here, but we don't care that much about what they have to say," said Tom Tucker, a math professor at the University of Rochester who maintains a blog called rochesterturning.com.

The fact that her comments on lobbyists didn't doom Clinton with the Netroots crowd speaks to an important aspect of the movement. Although the liberal bloggers can be in-your-face and sometimes of questionable taste -- for example, the Lamont supporter who depicted Lieberman in blackface -- they are not necessarily interested in fringe issues or idealistic principles like taking the money out of politics.

They are all about electing Democrats to office, using the same rhetorical or financial weapons Republicans use, according to interviews. Ralph Nader would not be welcome here. In fact, Dennis Kucinich was booed when he said, "Why don't people vote? Because they don't think there's much difference between the two parties."

Many of the YearlyKos sessions were more practical than ideological, with such titles as "Going on TV" and "Precinct Organizing." A panel stacked with congressional candidates who lost their races in 2006 was optimistically dubbed "Future Leaders" because all of them are running again.

Still, there was opportunity for lots of hand-wringing about how the blogosphere is not all it should be. The blurb for one forum, called "blogging while female," noted, "The blogosphere was supposed to be a place where gender didn't matter and voice was all. So what happened?"

Several attendees noted that it was the whitest group they'd ever been in. It was fairly male, too, and surprisingly gray. Bloggers said that while their biggest stars, like Daily Kos namesake Markos Moulitsas, tend to be in their 20s and 30s, the foot soldiers are often in their 40s to 60s.

In her breakout session before the debate, Clinton thanked the Netroots for helping to make the Democratic Party strong and said she wished they'd been around when she was trying to reform healthcare in the early 1990s.

But she ended on a note that could be taken as a warning to bloggers that they had to reach beyond their own tech-savvy, anger-fueled circle: "We have to reach out to people who may never read a blog but who know in their core that we have to have a new direction in this country."