I love me some Anglachel, in many respects. In her review of Eric Boehlert’s book Bloggers on the Bus, she notes that it’s missing some important precursors of the blogosphere, such as the Daily Howler and Media Whores. But she also goes on and on about how the Netroots was run by the Obama campaign and became part of the media circle, whose job it was to elect Obama. Since Anglachel was and is a complete Clinton partisan, her objection isn’t to partisanship, it is to partisanship for Obama despite the fact that Clinton was better on a number of domestic issues (such as healthcare).
I was managing editor of the Agonist during the primaries, and managing editor of FDL after the primaries and during the campaign proper. Here’s the deal: with a couple of exceptions (such as Americablog), the A-list was not primarily for Obama in the primaries. As much as it was for anyone, its preference was John Edwards, though for various reasons it never fully got on board his campaign (something which displeased me at the time, and spare me the “he was cheating” amateur quarterbacking, since no one I knew believed it during the primary).
What Obama did wasn’t to manage the A-listers, he cut past the A-listers with direct outreach to their readers and captured their base from them. The Netroots didn’t turn pro-Obama from the top down, it turned pro-Obama from the bottom up. I saw this both at the Agonist and FDL. I saw it other places. Clinton was never that popular online, and when it became clear that Edwards wasn’t going to win, the majority of readers turned to Obama.
The A-listers did not lead on this. As with the old joke about political leadership, they saw where the crowd was running, and they ran to the front of the pack and pretended to lead. There were exceptions, such as MyDD, where Jerome Armstrong remained pro-Clinton. And there were honorable cases of this. Jane Hamsher at FDL was very clear, for example, that FDL would support whoever the Democratic nominee was. If it had been Clinton or Edwards or Kucinich, I can guarantee FDL would have supported that person. Hard. I think the same is true of most other A-listers though there’s no question that some made threats of not supporting Clinton. The majority of such articles however, however, were written not by A-listers themselves, but diarists.
In Democratic party politics you have power if you can either deliver an identifiable block of voters, or if you can deliver money. Barack Obama bypassed the blogs on both counts, getting the voters and the money without needing the Netroots. If the Lieberman primary was a bow shot across the establishment by the Netroots, the presidential election of 2008 was a demonstration of the limits of Netroots power and of the fact that with enough money and smart operatives the A-listers were gatekeepers who could be bypassed.
That doesn’t mean that Anglachel isn’t partially correct that the A-list has been partially co-opted. Parts of it have, without question. But to think that the A-list has become part of the Village is incorrect. The Village doesn’t need the A-list, and knows it. Barack Obama proved it.
Japan is going to be a lot less willing to finance US deficits and consumer spending than in the past, and economically it is going to be looking much more to other Asian nations.