[Note: Updated below.]
Just shy of a year in existence, the blog-based PorkBusters campaign is making bigger waves than at any point intervening. The investigation into a secret hold on an earmark accountability bill by Sen. Tom Coburn (arguably the campaign’s best friend in Washington) and Sen. Barack Obama is reaching tidal/tsunamic proportions, and even made CNN this week. Danny Glover — who never gets too old for this — has the back story.
As of this morning, the coalition of mostly right-leaning bloggers have narrowed down the suspects to just a handful of candidates: at least as of now it depends on who you ask, but Ted Stevens is to this case as Richard Armitage was to Plamegate — no one will be shocked if/when the hold turns out to be his; in fact, a little-noticed Arkansas newspaper report from Aug. 18 quotes Coburn himself going all J’Accuse! on Stevens.
As of yesterday, PorkBusters’ Secret Hold page counted Stevens, Thomas Carper, Mel Martinez, Mike Crapo, Judd Gregg, Orrin Hatch, Robert Bennett and Jay Rockefeller, down from about 40 senators earlier in the week. If nothing else, this list may well comprise the senators with the most Internet-illiterate staffs.
Until now, the PorkBusters campaign has mostly sailed under the MSM radar screen, even during its previous high watermarks, killing the bridge to nowhere and helping derail Roy Blunt’s try for the majority leader position. Some of the attention is undoubtedly owed to the left-oriented TPM Muckraker for having just now joined the effort to unmask the holder, and for good or ill, the liberal blogs usually get more media play.
It’s a curious bipartisanship, and not just because TPMm’s Paul Kiel got PorkBusters co-founder NZ Bear’s name (handle, actually) wrong in one post [update: since corrected]. For one thing, this is the sort of thing TPM Muckraker and site overseer Josh Marshall do all the time — the right-blogosphere doesn’t pursue investigations quite so often (the most successful have been one-shots like the exposure of fraudulent Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj). Nor is it too closely coordinated, considering the differing opinions of who’s in and who’s out: As of just last night, Republican-leaning PorkBusters had given a pass to Robert Byrd, whereas Democratic-leaning TPMm had not.
While conservatives might bristle at the notion that they need liberals’ support to grow the PorkBusters effort, the theme of openness is a natural fit with the Democratic netroots’ disillusionment with the Beltway elite. Daily Kos front-pager SusanG wrote about this a couple weeks ago, but only linked PorkBusters in an update, apparently unaware of its existence until then.
TPMm has given the project a shot in the arm, but it remains to be seen if the partnership will persist after this pursuit has concluded. There’s really no reason why the PorkBusters effort shouldn’t be more bipartisan. It’s true that pork has historically been a libertarian/conservative concern (this largely explains the lopsided participation) but in an era where progressives have learned to stake out a fiscal position to the right of Republicans whenever possible, more should be climbing aboard.
Indeed, the campaign is not especially partisan in nature, but fundamentally anti-insider in nature. If the PorkBusters bloggers can keep its momentum going in the next several months, with conservative blogs challenging Republicans and liberal blogs going after Democrats, it will reinforce the presumed anti-incumbent tenor of the midterm elections.
P.S. Traffic-wise, porkbusters.org has been supported almost exclusively by co-founder Glenn Reynolds. To be fair, the real campaign lives not on its home site, but on those of its participatory bloggers, again primarily Instapundit, but also Hugh Hewitt, and now TPM Muckraker. The site’s main page is essentially an RSS aggregator reposting just about anything mentioning PorkBusters about the campaign (including those who are not so happy about having their articles republished).
Update: Well, that didn’t take very long: Sen. Stevens’ office has admitted the hold was theirs. On the other hand, wouldn’t it behoove the Palm Beach Post to mention that the “much speculation” occurred in the blogosphere? Especially considering the Post reported this on their blog? That duty is left to Stevens spokesperson, who also utters these famous last words:
Going to the blogs and the media with these concerns is not the way we have ever operated.
Update 2: TPMm confirms Robert Byrd in fact also placed a hold on the bill, has now released it, and his spokesperson has succeeded in not saying something the blogs would take badly.
So the left-right coalition can count this as win, like the Kos-Krempasky testimony before the FEC last year: a rare cross-ideology collaboration (and at least in these few cases, when they team up, they do win). And now, on to the questions about what happens next. TPMm again, asks an intriguing question: Are Even Porkbusting Projects Full of Pork?


Blog Traffic As A Reverse Bell Curve (Kind Of)
The comments to the Hotline On Call post that started the McCain/Mele Melee (feel free to borrow this phrase!) calls to mind, though doesn’t perfectly illustrate, a truism not just of politics but of the blogosphere in particular: Centrists are loved by no one, not even fellow centrists.
Originally, the post mistakenly identified Reynolds as “center-left.” Verbatim down to the formatting, reader Kathleen complained:
And so it was corrected — but a few hours later Not Marc (possibly referring to post co-author Marc Ambinder, perhaps even a handle of the Not Larry Sabato variety) disagreed with the updated descriptor:
Here at Blog P.I., we have cast aspersions on the oft-proctored renounce-your-allies tests employed by the left and right, and this is a typical case; Reynolds points readers to Little Green Footballs, but that shouldn’t constitute an endorsement of LGF’s commenters. This kind of guilt-by-association has unfairly dinged the man behind Big Orange, and Reynolds has said before this is one reason why he doesn’t have a comment section of his own — and singled out the Lizardoids as a specific example. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t even self-identify as conservative, but in much of the blogosphere, it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself. (Many of Reynolds’ own fans even dispute his non-conservatism.) And if you do describe yourself as “center” anything, you’re more likely to get burned at both ends.
I’d also wager that even moderates are more likely to criticize fellow moderates, because their independence in part defines them, and their particular issues are also different. Centrist is not a definite category like Left or Right; it’s a None of the Above or Other. And overall, there are fewer moderates driving big traffic compared to their more ideological (or more easily-pegged) peers.
If you lined up a sample of blogs according to ideology along a left-right axis, I predict you’d find something resembling an inverse bell curve — though traffic would drop off again as one approaches either fringe. On the other hand: While the high traffic sites are found closer to the edges, if the center of this curve describes an amalgam of different philosophies, a long-tail effect would flatten the curve, maybe a little, maybe a lot. So it could be a fat upside-down bell, if that makes any sense.
All of which presumes, of course, that one could even agree on how to classify individual blogs as lefterer and righterer (these should be real words) compared to their peers. Which raises too many questions for this post, and cries out for the sort of levity provided by Fred, also in the Hotline’s comments: