As the presidential candidates race heats up, the political power of the blogosphere is growing.
All eight Democratic presidential candidates will be wooing potential supporters at the YearlyKos convention beginning on Thursday, a key gathering for liberal bloggers organized by DailyKos – one of the first and most influential political blogs. The event, btw, will be covered by some 200 political journalists–which says something about just how much things have changed.
As for the candidates, they will participate in a debate on Saturday and hold one-on-one meetings with bloggers at the convention. In a remarkable shift in the traditional model of political campaigning, the same candidates snubbed the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Tennessee last week — a traditional staging ground for Democratic candidates for the past half century.
Even more striking is the Washington Times suggestion that bloggers are playing a key role in dragging Democratic candidates further left on the political spectrum. Hillary Clinton, for one, has now adopted a firm anti-war stance in response to the enormous anti-war mobilization on the Internet, including MoveOn’s virtual march against escalation and anti-war social networks like Stray the Course.
How will Republicans respond? Right wing political activists have long dominated the radio waves, but Republican politicians they have not embraced the Internet will the same enthusiasm and deftness demonstrated by liberal politicos. Key Republicans candidates, including Giuliani, opted out of the YouTube debates, preferring to stick with traditional tactics instead.
Republicans commentators are apparently perturbed by the state of affairs. The Weekly Standard called the Democratic candidates’ participation in the meeting “disappointing” due to DailyKos’ allegedly anti-Semitic views. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly goes further, describing DailyKos as “one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer”, comparable to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party (watch him in action here).
Perhaps Republicans feel threated by the great strides Democrats have made to harness the Web to raise funds, energize the grassroots, and generally flatten democratic processes. One thing is certain: if Republicans don’t embrace the Web as the new medium for democratic politics they will cede a great deal more political territory to Democrats in the years to come.
