Two previous topics at Blog P.I. have been newspaper journalists’ tendency to hold the word “netroots” at arms length, and the extent to which Robert Novak, so old he built the school, “gets” the Internet.
Novak’s column in this morning’s Post, about Barack Obama’s current overseas travel, affords us the chance to put them together. Here he is on Obama’s recent shift centerward:
Since clinching the nomination, Obama has been cautiously executing a Nixonian post-primary pivot toward the center. He weathered the outrage of his “net-roots” bloggers over his vote for the national security wiretapping bill.
Really, “net-roots”? This is even worse than the Washington Post’s habit of hyphenating the term; when I last mentioned this in March 2007, the term didn’t warrant scare quotes. And I’m pretty sure the punctuation is Novak’s, as I think I’ve been told the Post doesn’t hold opinion writers to the stylebook it applies to the news pages.
On the other hand, if you’re part of the netroots, you have to be at least somewhat pleased that Robert Novak recognizes your political clout — to say nothing of your existence.
N.B. Elsewhere in today’s paper, Jose Antonio Vargas’ report from Netroots Nation refers to them simply as “Netroots,” and that of course is sans quotation marks. As long as “Internet” continues to require capitalization, I’m fine with this formulation.
Is this on the “cyber-space”?
Reminds me of Herman T. Zweibel from The Onion. I miss that old coot…