I caught up with Portsmouth Mayor and Democratic senatorial candidate Steve Marchand in, of all places, Chicago today where he was making a one-day stop at the DailyKos bloggers convention.
Marchand made what he told me was “long day” trip to Chicago and back to make contacts and broaden his “political tactics” while hanging out with hundreds of the most influential political liberal and progressive bloggers in the country.
“It’s exciting to see people who give a darn about the political process,” Marchand said through choppy cell phone connection from downtown Chicago.
For a DailyKos blog that’s only five years old and a convention being held for the second time, the 2007 gathering has drawn serious attention from the media crowd and another group of interested spectators — seven of the eight presidential candidates who will speak and have significant campaign presence.
“There’s no shortage of candidates,” Marchand said about what I consider to be a remarkable development — especially when you match that against where they didn’t go, the centerist Democratic Leadership Council, a group that in 2007 can best be described as afraid of its shadow.
For Marchand, he knows quite well the potential money-raising and organizing heft that can be realized by making more than an acquaintance with the ‘net roots crowd.
Below, I’ve added a Wall Street Journey story about the convention
By Amy Schatz
Chicago
Fox News talk-show host Bill O’Reilly couldn’t have given New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a better opening.
In mid-July, Mr. O’Reilly devoted a portion of his weeknight show to attacking a convention of liberal bloggers that began Thursday.
Organized by the liberal blog Daily Kos, the event has brought together hundreds of bloggers, journalists, party insiders and Democratic presidential candidates for a three-day wonk-fest of panels, speeches and what promise to be beer-soaked parties.
Calling Daily Kos a “vicious far-left Web site,” Mr. O’Reilly spent a segment of his broadcast attacking the blog and asking why the conference’s lone major corporate sponsor, JetBlue Airways Corp., would support a site that allows readers to post hateful comments.
Daily Kos bloggers—its staff of editors and their many readers/contributors—took offense at Mr. O’Reilly’s attack, and a war of words broke out.
It took less than a day for the blog to acquire an unlikely champion: Sen. Clinton, who has been a favorite target of the blog’s writers for her vote to authorize the Iraq war and her refusal to apologize for it. Within days of Mr. O’Reilly’s attack, the Clinton campaign launched a pro-Kos petition drive, issued a statement of support and sent communications director Howard Wolfson onto Mr. O’Reilly’s show to defend the bloggers.
The strategy worked to reduce suspicions of Sen. Clinton among the bloggers gathering here. “Hillary appears invested in the netroots, which is a great thing for all of us,” wrote Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, on his blog last week. “Hillary’s response against attacks by Fox News partisans is a sign of growing respect” for bloggers, Mr. Moulitsas told reporters here yesterday.
Mr. Moulitsas noted on his blog that the Clinton campaign’s aggressive defense of liberal bloggers “was to send a message that the Hillary campaign was going to have our backs when attacked by the right-wing’s smear mongers.”
The episode underscores how important the writer-activists have become to the Democratic Party—and how much this weekend’s Daily Kos get-together illustrates the trend. Liberal bloggers now routinely get invited to campaign events to meet candidates, they receive press credentials and sometimes are given exclusive information during briefings and blogger conference calls.
When this weekend’s convention was attacked, other campaigns also leapt to the bloggers’ defense. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd vowed to go on Mr. O’Reilly’s show this week to defend the site. Others issued statements of support. Now, on Saturday afternoon, most of the Democratic field (minus Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, who is hawking a new book and sent his regrets) will answer questions from the YearlyKos crowd, capping off three days of discussions and panels such as “Ballot Initiative Campaigns,” “What to Do About the Religious Right,” and “How to Get Your Blog Noticed.”
Having bloggers on your side hardly guarantees electoral victory. Four years ago, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean was a blogger favorite, but his presidential campaign flamed out in Iowa. Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman remains widely despised among many netroots—the grass roots of the Internet— bloggers for his vote for the Iraq war, and they helped lead to his defeat in the state’s Democratic primary to businessman Ned Lamont. But Mr. Lieberman easily won re-election in 2006 running as an independent.
Yet for less-known Democratic candidates, including some hopefuls who are heading here this weekend, liberal bloggers have proven to be an effective grass-roots army for raising money and creating excitement among the liberal base. Progressive bloggers have raised more than $25 million since 2005 through ActBlue, a political action committee funded by online donations from bloggers and their readers. It helps funnel small donations to campaigns.
Some 500 bloggers and 250 journalists will be among the 1,500 people attending the second annual convention, organizers say. For months, DailyKos bloggers have been trying to raise money to help put on the event, which organizers say broke even when it was first held last year. In the wake of the O’Reilly controversy, Daily Kos reported JetBlue asked that its logo be taken off the convention’s Web site, although the airline allowed the convention’s organizers to keep plane tickets it had donated. JetBlue couldn’t be reached to comment.
Until the Clinton campaign’s aggressive defense on Mr. O’Reilly’s show of the netroots—a term that usually refers to liberal Internet activists—there was speculation that the New York senator could receive a somewhat frosty reception from the Kos crowd. “There are definitely people who are anti-Hillary in the blogosphere,” says Jane Hamsher, founder of the popular progressive blog Firedoglake. “To have a candidate like that send a surrogate onto Bill O’Reilly to defend the blogosphere was really a step forward,” she says.
The New York senator hasn’t won all of them over yet. Even after her campaign defended the bloggers, she still only scored third in the Daily Kos monthly presidential straw poll of readers, behind former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards at 36% and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama at 27%. But Mrs. Clinton’s 9% showing was still her highest in more than a year.
The O’Reilly incident was just the latest in a quiet campaign by the Clinton camp to try to win over liberal bloggers. Earlier this year, Sen. Clinton participated in a live chat on Ms. Hamsher’s blog to answer reader questions. When she received the endorsement of former ambassador Joe Wilson, a hero among the liberal netrrots for standing up to the Bush administration, her team first announced it on a blogger conference call.
“The idea behind this has been similar to her Senate campaign, where as people get to know her, they get to like her,” says Peter Daou, the head of the Clinton camp’s Internet-outreach efforts. Before joining the campaign, Mr. Daou compiled a best-of-the-blogs column on Salon.com, which endeared him to many writers who received attention after he spotlighted their work.
“There are bloggers with three readers and bloggers with 300,000 who each have an important voice. We don’t limit [efforts] to high-traffic bloggers,” Mr. Daou says.
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