All posts tagged netroots

Netroots, DCCC Find Common Ground

Originally published at Beltway Blogroll

When Democratic bloggers first came on the political scene, they clashed with the party establishment’s fundraising apparatus in Washington. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in particular was a frequent target of netroots scorn.

Not this year. The DCCC has paired with the netroots fundraising vehicle ActBlue in a new campaign dubbed “Red To Blue” in order to raise cash for candidates fighting in some of the country’s toughest Republican strongholds.

Here are the details from an e-mail I received from ActBlue last week:

Not only is ActBlue partnering with the DCCC at this stage of the effort, ActBlue played a critical role in drawing the DCCC’s attention to the profiled candidates.Of the first group of “Red to Blue” candidates, eight have used ActBlue to build a community of supporters and raise critical early funds, and the remaining two, as yet unnamed nominees in Illinois and Louisiana, are being supported by ActBlue’s pioneering “Democratic Nominee Funds.”

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by Danny Glover on January 24, 2008  •  Permalink
Posted in Media, Politics
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Posted by Danny Glover on January 24, 2008

https://kdanielglover.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/netroots-dccc-find-common-ground/

The Online Curse Of Incumbency

Originally published at NationalJournal.com
By K. Daniel Glover

Bloggers of all political persuasions hate “the establishment.” If that wasn’t clear before last Tuesday’s primaries, it certainly is now. Voters in Connecticut, Georgia and Michigan handed electoral pink slips to three members of Congress, and blogs were a factor in all three upsets.

The Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut, where netroots hero Ned Lamont defeated Sen. Joe Lieberman 52 percent to 48 percent, generated the most attention. If blogs were published in newsprint instead of online, the Internet activists who fret about global warming would have consumed enough paper in writing about the Connecticut battle to destroy a rain forest.

But the role of blogs in defeating Lieberman went far beyond just ranting against him for his support of the Iraq war and other initiatives of President Bush. Bloggers were involved in the race from start to finish, as detailed by writer Ari Melber at The Huffington Post and the The Nation.

Lamont met with at least one key blogger (Matt Stoller of MyDD) early in his campaign, later hired another (Tim Tagaris) away from the Democratic National Committee, and used a third (Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake) as a volunteer production editor for his first video blog. Bloggers helped raise more than $300,000 for him online. They also followed his campaign across Connecticut and swarmed his headquarters on Election Night.

Before the votes were counted, some top bloggers tried to downplay their role in aiding Lamont. And when Hamsher embarrassed the campaign by painting Lieberman in blackface, Lamont unconvincingly claimed, “I don’t know anything about the blogs.” Now that Lamont has won, though, bloggers are beginning to boast of their newfound power within the Democratic structure.

“[B]logs are now vital parts of the party, displacing the lobbyist-lawyers-operatives whose organs were the New Republic and the Washington Post editorial page, and whose power flowed through their alliances with insular state machines and bigwig journalists,” Stoller wrote Wednesday.

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by Danny Glover on August 14, 2006  •  Permalink
Posted in Blogging, Media, Politics
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Posted by Danny Glover on August 14, 2006

https://kdanielglover.wordpress.com/2006/08/14/the-online-curse-of-incumbency/

Book Review: ‘An Army Of Davids,’ ‘Crashing The Gate’

Originally published at NationalJournal.com
By K. Daniel Glover

In the days of Julius Caesar (as imagined by William Shakespeare), a soothsayer warned the Roman emperor to “beware the ides of March.” Caesar dismissed that “dreamer,” but his warning proved prophetic: Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C. on March 15 — the ides of March.

In the days of Instapundit, the Blog Father and Kos, the leaders of the American republic have something else to beware: the blog books of March. There are two of them on the shelves now, and both paint scenarios that are unfriendly, if not downright hostile, toward the folks who run the government, the media and more.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds got his book, “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths,” on store shelves first. He was in Washington, D.C., earlier this month to promote it.

This week, “Crashing The Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics” is officially released, and it is openly billed as a “shot across the bow at the political establishment in Washington.” The authors – Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and his blog father, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD – are in the capital city today to start a promotional tour.

Both books are about an ongoing information revolution that is being driven in part by bloggers, but each takes a different approach.

“An Army of Davids” is the more sweeping of the two. Reynolds covers everything from home-brewed beer and blogging (always a volatile mix) to nanotechnology and human settlement of Mars (the things you think about after consuming too many home-brewed beers).

His book also is both less political and defiant than “Crashing The Gate.” Reynolds is not so much fomenting rebellion as he is reporting on the technologically enhanced changes well under way across society.

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by Danny Glover on March 27, 2006  •  Permalink
Posted in Blogging, Media, Politics, Technology
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Posted by Danny Glover on March 27, 2006

https://kdanielglover.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/book-review-an-army-of-davids-crashing-the-gate/

The Netroots Versus The Establishment

Originally published by NationalJournal.com
By K. Daniel Glover

The unexpectedly strong showing of Democrat Paul Hackett in Ohio’s Aug. 2 special House election has Democratic bloggers pumped about their party’s political prospects. But an increasingly bitter battle between the Democratic “netroots” and the Washington establishment over the party’s political strategy and policy priorities could undermine such efforts.

The upstarts who believe that every GOP seat should be contested have had their fill of campaign “experts,” especially those at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and right now they are attacking their own party as harshly as they do the enemy.

“Every Republican should be on notice,” said Bob Brigham, a blogger at Swing State Project who traveled to Ohio’s 2nd District in the last days of Hackett’s race. “But so should the Democratic establishment.”

The netroots have a bold vision that is based on the 50-state strategy of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, the party gadfly whose 2004 presidential campaign ignited the fire within the belly of the liberal blogosphere. John Kerry doused Dean’s flame in that race, but the “Deaniacs” are true believers in his often-liberal ideology and unconventional thinking.

Their determination to fight everywhere, and to use in-your-face, sometimes vulgar rhetoric about the war in Iraq and the GOP “culture of corruption,” was apparent immediately after Hackett’s defeat. At TPMCafe, blogger Josh Marshall invited readers to name vulnerable Republicans. The query elicited several typical responses, like incumbents who won with 55 percent of the vote or less in 2004, but the tone of the comments suggested a passion for unrestrained political warfare.

One reader calling himself “Electoral Math” pointed to a blog-published list that identified the House races won by less than 20 percent. That kind of spread is unlikely to prompt many bets from the DCCC or any other Washington-based campaign group, but the reader saw reason for confidence. “A 12-point swing takes every seat on that list,” he wrote. “A more modest six-point swing takes 29 out of 47.”
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by Danny Glover on August 15, 2005  •  Permalink
Posted in Blogging, Politics, Technology
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Posted by Danny Glover on August 15, 2005

https://kdanielglover.wordpress.com/2005/08/15/the-netroots-versus-the-establishment/