As it turns out, the only website that seems any different is SoapBlox itself. Gone, for the moment, is the lengthy blogroll of mostly state-based liberal (and one conservative) blogs, as well as the archives. That’s too bad, because they provided some insight to the haphazard operation of Paul “pacified” Preston. One of the last posts in December featured a harried Preston threatening to shut down the blogs of any site operators more than two months behind on their bills. No word on if he followed through, and unfortunately the last year of SoapBlox is unfortunately missing from the Wayback Machine.

Instead, the most recent post is itself now twenty-four hours old — a press release from Preston not quite admitting he’d overreacted but sounding altogether more rational than midweek. Here’s an excerpt:

At this time, all services are returned to normal.

We have many wonderful people now volunteering to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Clean servers are being created, and existing sites will be migrated shortly on to these more secure servers.

Discussions are currently underway on how to best provide the SoapBlox service, continually improve it, and keep it funded in a way that keeps everything running smoothly. Soon we will be establishing a way for you to help provide whatever you are willing to keep SoapBlox–and a large chunk of the progressive blogosphere–safe, secure and constantly improving.

Please monitor SoapBlox.net for future announcements, and feel free to contact us at soapblox@gmail.com with any ideas or suggestions you might have. Everything is on the table.

I apologize with all of my heart for the events of the past two days–from the lack of proper communication, to not seeking help that so many of you are willing to give earlier.

And what of the rumors that site passwords across the network had been compromised?
Beats me. I could be wrong, or they could be pressing ahead regardless. If I hear anything more definitive, Blog P.I. will cover it.

P.S. Thanks to Owen Thomas at Valleywag/Gawker for the link. He closes his post on the subject with this:

I suspect [liberal bloggers'] built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox’s customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That’s far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

I don’t think I would chalk this up to antipathy to capitalism. I’d say it’s more a combination of deficiency of savvy and casual clubbiness. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, how do we learn to blog? We learn to blog from what we read every day. Paul Preston is no Buffalo Bill, but it would behoove bloggers to look more closely at whom they’re trusting with the very websites that makes them bloggers.

SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST

It was a good ride, but it’s over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don’t have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the “We’re Out of Business” post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox’s ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

This is unprecedented, I think. TypePad suffered a particularly nasty DDOS attack in 2006, but it lived to tell the tale, and is none the worse for it as far as I’m aware. And normally I don’t quote blog posts in full, but from the tone of the message, I wouldn’t count on it remaining up for long.

SoapBlox, for the uninitated, is two things: community blogging software and a weblog hosting company. Right now, any blog hosted by the company is down and is not coming back, at least until the owners migrate their sites to a new content management system, such as Scoop (on which SoapBlox was based and had largely replaced) or the widely-used, open-source WordPress.

Some of the sites offline already are among the most prominent in state-level blogospheres, including Blue Hampshire, Blue Jersey, Blue Mass Group, and Left in the West. Also down is Pam’s House Blend, which has a national audience.

Blogs using SoapBlox but hosted elsewhere are, for the moment, still up. However, I’m hearing that the software has been irretrievably hacked: security can no longer be guaranteed, for anyone. If true, this means that hackers have private information — including passwords and IP addresses — from supposedly anonymous accounts on some or all of the blogs using the software.

Among the sites still up but presumably compromised are Burnt Orange Report, Square State, The Albany Project, and nationally-read netroots blogs including My Left Wing and Open Left.

What happens next? One expects that the more popular SoapBlox websites will go temporarily offline as they transition to new software. In the short term, they may change appearance dramatically (layouts are specific to blogging software) and lose their archives. Less active sites, or those run by people with fewer time and money resources, may not survive.

But what does this mean for the netroots, or the blogosphere writ large? That will be very interesting to see.

Update: Ben Smith at The Politico, himself the proprietor of a state blog, writes:

The attack is a reminder of how little redundancy there is in big portions of the rapidly-expanding Internet, and how fragile the systems that manage content can be.

I presume that most, if not all, of the text from these sites is already cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. So for contributors now scrambling to back up their essays, this may prove a useful resource. But it doesn’t save images consistently, and those files may be gone for good.

Update 2: Some of the sites listed above have returned, at least for the moment. Pam Spaulding, whose site is back temporarily, writes:

Around 10PM last night, I found out Soapblox.net, the service that hosts many of the state blogs, has been hacked. I reported it on a couple of listservs and put an email in to Soapblox.

Pam’s House Blend, RadicalRuss.net, American Liberalism, BeThink.org are some of the sites affected, but many more went down later. I didn’t go through down the whole Soapblox blogroll but it seems most of the state blogs were not affected. The hack is restricted to only one server, but once they got in, other servers were compromised. …

Well, as you can imagine, there were a lot of unhappy bloggers losing their minds; in my case 3 years of my blog is on that platform, and it wasn’t clear what data was recoverable or when I would see it.

At some point later this morning the site is up. Now I have to get my content off of here and as of this moment, I don’t have FTP access to copy it down.

So enjoy the Blend while you can in this location.

And Eric B. of Michigan Liberal writes:

So far, it appears that Michigan Liberal’s servers haven’t been effected. Who knows…

What I do know is that a post on the SoapBlox site said that they are out of business. I have no idea what specifically that means. I am keeping a very close eye on the situation.

If you come back, and the place is dark, then you’ll know that we’ve lost our server.

Clearly, the fallout from this disaster is not yet known because it is not yet even understood. On the other hand, it’s providing a major opportunity for another company to step into the breach. One possibility: Markos Moulitsas, who has spent his own money customizing the old Scoop platform, could license it to others. I wouldn’t count on it, but a lot of people are in dire need of a solution right now.

Update 3: My NMS colleague Simon Owens of Bloggasm posts an e-mail making the rounds this morning. Here’s what it says:

My sincere apologies for posting this to several lists all at once, but this is a serious issue:

We are so goddamned screwed right now.

I spoke to Paul Preston a little while ago on the phone, and SoapBlox, according to him, is dead. Hacked, not worth resuscitating, and would cost too much money to restore with his ISP. We need to stop this from happening — if it turns out to be a matter of money to at least get the dead sites back up so we can archive them until we can move them all to another platform, then I would personally and on behalf of the other bloggers who are TOTALLY SCREWED RIGHT NOW appreciate it if the folks receiving this message who are interested in the continued existence of easily-built-and-maintained state-level community blogs could commit to making this happen.

Again, only if that proves to be the issue. But several of us are in true DEFCON 1 freakout mode here, and there’s not a whole lot else we can do.

Thanks for your consideration.

Update 4: The showrunner at SoapBlox, who blogs as “pacified”, has removed the post I led with and replaced it with one titled “SoapBlox is a Phoenix?”, which reads:

I am nothing but a dramatic person. I am sorry for that.

SoapBlox needs help. From all of you. How do we salvage this. How do we keep this going?

When you create something that becomes larger than yourself.

I apologize for being so dramatic. Again, I have a knack for that.

Giving up the fight may itself have been an overreaction, but it sounds like the software still has very serious problems. No matter what happens, it won’t be an easy dig out.

Update 5: Of course, it didn’t take long — just the third comment on the SoapBlox post — for this kind of speculation to emerge:

Maybe it was not such a good idea to have so many liberal websites at one ISP. The hackers, of course, are anonymous, but I smell a Rove-like rat out there.

The first point is a very good one. The latter, more like a natural defense mechanism.

N.B. Yes, it’s a weak headline. At least I didn’t go with “Ablogalypse Now”.

Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength.

Indeed, about the closer-watched Ohio election the Washington Post merely ran an AP story on A02; the Viriginia story ran on B05 in the Metro section. Neither buried, but neither featured. Had Weirauch had won, the anti-Republican mood of ‘06 would seem to be continuing. So it’s kind of funny where the Post chose to cut off the wire report:

But Democrats had high hopes about Weirauch’s chances against the younger Latta. This was her third run for the House, and last year, against Gillmor, she received the biggest share of the vote — 43 percent — of any Democrat in the district’s history.

I noticed the same dearth of barking from the blogs, too. Here’s everything the Memeorandum algorithm deemed significant this morning:

And the whole story was off the page by the beep of twelve.

Daily Kos featured just one recap of the special election, which seemed very bitter even after explaining how the NRCC had spent a big chunk of its cash on hand:

The Republicans are still trying to pretend that 2006 was an aberration. Yet they have to go all-out, it seems, to hold the ground they already have.

Yes, I was hoping for a better performance in this district. Yes, I’m disappointed.

Meanwhile, the RNC’s Jason Richardson said nyah in a post for GOP.com and at RedState, focused not on the party committees, but on the extra-party support apparatus:

Weirauch had heavy support from the DCCC, Daily Kos, Act Blue, Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, and EMILY’s LIST. We were severely out-manned in Ohio and Virginia and this is what they have to show for it? We came to the game to win. All in all, the liberal blogosphere should take heed: You’re not as powerful as you think and it’s about results not PR.

To be sure, these were retentions and the Virginia election was never much of a contest. But the Ohio race between Republican Bob Latta and Democrat Robin Weirauch was a focal point of both parties in recent weeks, with both parties’ house committees pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the district. Online, Slatecard and Big Red Tent both spotlighted the race and sent out fundraising pleas; Slatecard raised $1,908 from 21 supporters. Meanwhile Weirauch apparently collected more than $93,000 from ActBlue, some $15,600 raised by the Daily Kos/Open Left-backed Blue Majority and $12,300 by Wesley Clark’s WesPAC.

One race was obviously a dud and the other would prove to be one, too. It’s hard to nationalize a special election, and there was no Paul Hackett. In fact, there was barely an Iraq debate — though the Democrat in the Viriginia race, Philip Forgit, was an Iraq veteran. So the leftroots raised more money, but the rightroots (if not Rightroots) ended up with the win. But neither the leftosphere nor rightosphere owns this win or loss. This race just wasn’t won or lost online. And if it was a status quo election, Republicans have to be pleased with that.

Update: I somehow managed to miss Eric Pfeiffer’s understated observation, posted just after the beep-beep of twelve-thirty:

Bloggers Respond With Restraint to Yesterday’s OH/VA Special Elections

At least.

In just the past month, a few very large states have started talking about moving their presidential primaries to the first week in February. Those states include Illinois, Florida, New Jersey and the fifth-largest economy in the world, California. This shouldn’t be a surprise: the parties want a bigger say in presidential nominations, and the rest of each state wants a bigger slice of that billion-dollar pie. What’s more, Illinois would like to give favorite son Barack Obama a major boost — and they can’t do it if their primary still comes after Super Tuesday. According to The Green Papers, at least nine other states have taken steps to move their primaries up.

Primary front-loading is a perennial good-government gripe about the nomination process. Coincidentally or not, it continues unabated. And it’s not just the primaries — the presidential debates are starting even earlier this year. The rules are different on the Republican side, but over time, Republicans have generally adopted changes first proposed by the (more process-oriented) Democrats.

This time around the Democratic National Committee, under superlative-magnet chairman Howard Dean, deliberately enabled some noteworthy front-loading: Nevada’s caucus and South Carolina’s primary were both moved up to late January so union members and African-Americans would have a say in the process, whereas they would not in right-to-work Iowa and 97% white New Hampshire. Everybody else can go starting Feb. 5.

Remember that when Howard Dean ascended to party chair in early 2005, the Washington establishment balked. Dean’s support among liberal bloggers might have been a foregone conclusion, but one idea they shared with Dean — a plan to rebuild the party’s national reach by contesting races and spending money all around the country, even in districts previously abandoned to the GOP — helped him win over the state-based committee members who put him over the top.

Needless to say, this has been controversial inside the Beltway, especially after Dean’s slow fundraising start. The party has enjoyed fundraising success under Dean since then, but he’s given so much of it to state parties that the old complaints gave way to new ones.

Of course, the state parties love the arrangement. State party executive directors — they control state party budgets, not the unpaid, figurehead party chairs — queued up to accept their party-building money. For Dean, it was probably a smart move — it may have pre-empted James Carville’s would-be coup before it got very far.

But Dean’s indulgence of the state parties cuts both ways: Yes, he has their support when negotiating with the Beltway establishment. But the nomination process isn’t about that — it’s every state for themselves. And the state executive directors also know Dean won’t be in charge of the party forever: once a nominee is chosen, he or she becomes the de facto leader of the party, and who knows what happens after that. Are the states pressing their advantage now because they know Dean won’t say no to them?

I bet this wouldn’t be happening under Terry McAuliffe. To be sure, McAuliffe was complicit in front-loading the process himself — his big idea was to front-load things just enough to produce a nominee early to take on Bush. In practice, the John Kerry electability meme took hold around the same time and was decisive. (What meme will be temporarily entrenched a year from yesterday?) But his base of power was firmly inside the Beltway — the Clintons and their donors — and not in the states.

The DNC chair can invalidate a state’s primary, or withhold funds, or threaten to do these things. Certainly in public, Dean has said nothing of the sort, even though New Hampshire secretary of state William Gardner is ready to hopscotch Nevada and Florida is openly talking about moving its primary to Jan. 29 — a week ahead of the agreed-upon window.

When it comes to the nomination schedule, how far can the state parties go? What, if anything, can Dean do about it?

Let’s imagine that the big four states move their primaries up to the first Tuesday in February. (If not 2008, then 2012.) Along with the states already camped out here, that day will be worth more than 1,000 delegates (1,098 using 2004 figures). That’s almost exactly what Super Tuesday (March 2) was worth in 2004. If this happened, there wouldn’t be much of a Super Tuesday left, and the whole thing could be settled two weeks after the Iowa caucuses — where’s the fun in that?

So what do we call this… Mega Tuesday? There’s already been one of those. Uber Tuesday? Perhaps a little too Teutonic. Colossal Tuesday? You can never really count on naming these things, but for now I’m calling it Ginormous Tuesday.

Her detractors among those online activists did not wait long, either. At MyDD, one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left, Matt Stoller criticized her team for purchasing ads on some conservative blogs:

Why do people like HRC, no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?

Before long, another animadversion came from former Nevada [and current online] talk show host (and recent Stoller employee) Taylor Marsh, who was upset to find she had been left out:

It’s not like her team doesn’t know I exist. I find it a little annoying that Clinton’s team thinks that people like me don’t merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don’t reach the one-hundred thousand mark.

We’ll address the specifics of these charges, but in order to do so, first let’s try to describe the buy itself:

The Clinton team can’t or won’t say what they spent on the buy, but on Monday, Blog P.I. went digging through the extensive a la carte ordering page at Blogads to find out where they had made their buys and make a reasonably educated guess about how much they had spent.

While I am quite sure I did not locate every ad on every blog, the initial buy was worth at least $17,026 across at least 45 blogs. The buy comprised political blogs almost exclusively, liberal blogs overwhelmingly, and primarily those with a national reach. Nearly every liberal blog above 50,000 impressions per week picked up a blogad, though a few did not (as we’ll see below) and at least a few regional and small-traffic blogs also were included. The campaign bought some Premium ads (which are guaranteed to be the top ads visible) on liberal sites but generally stuck with the Standard ads, and went with the bargain buys on each of the conservative blogs included. And how many conservative blogs was that? I counted just four: Hugh Hewitt, Power Line, Captain’s Quarters and Wizbang Politics (i.e. not the front page), each worth between 550,000 and 150,000 impressions per week for a total $1,150.

Yesterday Blog P.I. contacted Clinton’s principal blog adviser, Peter Daou, for elaboration. As he explained, the first round was for the webcasts, the second round (which began last night) was for inviting supporters and potential supporters to submit guest blog posts. According to Daou, future buys will focus on particular issues Sen. Clinton wants to highlight, and in states and regions where she will be traveling. The strategy is not fixed, and more to the point, neither are the number of sites. “A blog being excluded has absolutely no implication, except we’ll get there next time,” Daou said. “We’ll try to get as many bloggers as possible.” For anyone who remembers Daou’s last gig, the blog roundup published by Salon which still bears his name, Daou often went out of his way to reach down and pull obscure blogs up into the mix. To be sure, he’s not spending his own money, and cheap as Blogads can be, even Hillary Clinton does not have unlimited funds. But to the extent he can, it’s reasonable to expect that Daou will keep doing so.

And on Wednesday night, hours after the final webcast, the ad strategy did indeed shift: At the same time the buy expanded on liberal blogs, it disappeared from the conservative sites. To the Clinton team, it made sense to get attention from the right when the focus was on the webcast, but now that the ads are inviting people to submit guest posts to her site, inviting the “winguts” would indeed be a waste of time. Had they not made this distinction here, Stoller’s gripe surely would have been right.

But here’s the interesting thing: Blogads buys are one-week minimum commitments, though advertisers can change the specific ad as many times as they want — or remove it entirely. This is just what they’ve done: In order to stick to the plan, they have no choice but to pay Power Line and the rest not to run the ad, at least for a few more days (surely someone will compare this to farm subsidies, but no one has; one might say they’re just not into her).

For example, here is a screen shot taken last night, confirming two ads running on Power Line:

But here is the Power Line sidebar as of last night:

Not that the ads necessarily earned anyone’s approval: Dean Barnett, Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger, took exception and* deemed it a misstep on Hillary’s part:

If Hillary is advertising to reach out to our core audience, she should save her money. I get your emails – I know none of you will be supporting Hillary in the Democratic primaries. … Presidential campaigns are often poorly and profligately run. Howard Dean, for instance, burned through a gazillion dollars getting absolutely no bang for his bucks and couldn’t tell you at the end of the day where all the money went.

Barnett surmised that Clinton’s “purchaser didn’t do his homework and decided that it would be a swell expenditure to run ads here and on Powerline” — but Barnett has been around the blogosphere (and was the Weekly Standard’s go-to guy on the leftosphere) long enough to know who Daou is, and to recognize that Daou would know exactly what to find at Power Line.

To this I will add just one more thing. On Tuesday, veteran Democratic operative and now Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told Hotline’s Blogometer:

We’re on some conservative sites because we’re not ceding any territory. We take nothing for granted.

To me this sounds a lot like the fighting spirit bloggers hold dearly — taking the fight to the other side’s camp. But that isn’t Sen. Clinton’s reputation with the netroots.

Now to Marsh’s complaint. Her site is currently worth 42,806 views per week, just below the point where buys were near-automatic. She and Daou disagree on whether or not the campaign attempted to buy on her site, but as I do not have sufficient evidence to make a judgment, I’ll stay out of that question. Rather, let’s look at the circumstances:

As I dug through Blogads earlier this week, I found that liberal blogs with considerably more readers than Marsh were also not included in the initial ad buy: Juan Cole, Sadly, No!, BartCop, This Modern World, After Downing Street and Burnt Orange Report among them. They did not complain, but when the ad focus shifted on Thursday night, some of them were brought into the fold. Now they’re even on the low-traffic personal blog of Matthew Gross, who happens to be John Edwards’ blog adviser. And, yes, Taylor Marsh.

Other blogs that arguably reach the same demographic but were excluded include TV Newser, not to mention some of Clinton’s constituents, Curbed and Gothamist. The latter snub is somewhat notable considering she did buy on Gothamist’s DC affiliate, DCist. Heck, why not buy on Cute Overload? That site reaches a lot of people, and certainly fits with her warm and fuzzy approach. Same goes for Treehugger. It’s these lifestyle blogs that seem to lie beyond the campaign’s purview, while the campaign is “rotating,” as Daou put it, ads throughout Advertise Liberally Blogad network. [Update: Charles Kuffner has a point.]

Additionally, Some of Marsh’s complaints are confusing to me. She wrote, for example:

Single proprietor bloggers may not get the traffic of the gigantic community blogs, but we do a lion share of the work out here as well. … Taking me out of the equation for a moment, shouldn’t Clinton at least help out a few of the small female only blogs, reaching out to females everywhere? You’d think that would be important to her.

Yet Feministing and Pam’s House Blend are just the kind of female-only blogs Marsh describes, and they were included. In fact, Pam’s House Blend along with female-led Firedoglake were among the few sites to pick up Premium ad buys. Similar complaints likewise were off-target. At MyDD, Texas Nate hit Clinton’s camp for not buying on a few specific regional blogs. One was Bleeding Iowa which, so far as I can tell, does not support Blogads.

And to editorialize for a moment, there is something unseemly about complaining that an advertiser did not buy ads on one’s site. Daou and the Clinton team are under no obligation to buy ads on anybody’s site. Yes, Marsh is a member of the netroots in good standing — she has worked for the SEIU and MyDD to cover a labor dispute in Las Vegas — but the same is true of dozens of other bloggers whom Clinton missed on the first round. As Daou said to me, it’s impossible to buy on every site. And at least as of this morning, Marsh has made no acknowledgment of her inclusion in the next phase of the Clinton ad buy.

If it’s not exactly extortion, it does betray the kind of myopic egocentrism that establishment Democrats use — sometimes as an excuse, sometimes not — to keep the netroots at bay.

It was probably inevitable that there would be pushback when Hillary Clinton sought to engage the blogosphere. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the netroots’ legitimate policy disagreements with her have led to reflexive negative reactions to virtually anything she does.

Here is an example, taken from MyDD this week: In a post titled “Playing the Electability Card,” Chris Bowers interprets a memo by Clinton pollster Mark Penn (as summarized by Newsday) — comparing his candidate favorably to her rivals — as playing the “electability card,” thereby denigrating the Democratic party as a whole and reinforcing Republican stereotypes. Problem is, there’s no Penn quote that clearly says this; the more plausible interpretation is that Hillary has more experience standing up to the kind of GOP attacks Bowers fears could be effective. Most perplexingly, the only Democrat whose “electability” is questioned in the Newsday article is Hillary — and in the second paragraph, no less. Although Penn’s claim that other campaigns are “stalled or falling” is dubious, there’s nothing scandalous about him putting Hillary Clinton in the best possible light. That is his job, after all.

Hillary Clinton’s longstanding position on the Iraq war puts her squarely at odds with the netroots, whose creation and cohesion owes more to the Iraq invasion and subsequent deterioration than any other issue. Short of a full apology, there’s nothing she can do. Even then, Edwards did that a long time ago, and Obama never supported it in the first place (though he never had to actually cast a vote on it).

Clinton’s online campaign must be one largely of damage control — managing expectations and placating bloggers who long ago made up their mind against her. Yet while Marsh and others (such as radio talker Ed Schultz) complain that she is not reaching out to progressives, through the webcast, blogads and forthcoming guest blogs, that’s exactly what she’s trying to do. Whether Clinton can soften the netroots opposition to her is an open question, but considering the uphill battle, it was probably wise to get started on it first thing.

The Daily Kos diary “Begala: Dean ‘an a**hole from Vermont’,” which appeared yesterday, is a great example of one thing I’ve reflected on several times while reading the litany of blogosphere postmortems (especially the ones about races I was involved in): the deep divide between bloggers and mainstream professionals — let’s call them, us, the MSP.

To suggest the 50-state strategy is a big reason that the field expanded, as dKos contributor ScottforAmerica does in this post, is utter delusion. However, to suggest it had nothing to do with wins across the country, as he says Paul Begala did, is also dead wrong.

But as an MSP myself I am always going to be more sympathetic to the man whose name I have borrowed than, say, ScottforAmerica. Why?

Because Paul had to make his living doing this, as do I. For all I know, Scott is seeing his 3rd election cycle — maybe. Scott likely has never worked as a professional consultant, likely never had the benefit of seeing 10-20 races a cycle and learning the lessons that come with them. He’s probably never worked on a presidential campaign and maybe never even walked door-to-door as a regular volunteer or a ground level employee.

Maybe he has. I don’t know him. And not to single out Scott per se — this lack of serious political experience is true of most bloggers.

That said, Scott is bringing some nerve/backbone, new blood and determination to these contests. That fresh outsider-looking-in perspective is something I have absolutely loved in the past 4 years, something people like my quasi-namesake cautioned against.

I understand why Dems said “me too” with Bush and the GOP in 2002 and I think it was solid advice based on the strategies and polls we had at the time. But being wrong because the game changed on you doesn’t preclude you from being wrong. We got whooped in 2002. Scott also has his ideas about what works (e.g. 50-state strategy) that I don’t think are correct, but I don’t have data yet to absolutely dissuade him.

So, what does this mean? From my MSP perspective, I get pissed at the smug, know-it-all, cavalier attitude of bloggers like Scott because I feel like this post attacks me just as much as Paul Begala. The ending is really what gets me:

A new Democratic Party took a giant step forward today, a Democratic Party proud of it’s values and it’s principles, and one that won’t be afraid to stand up for our beliefs…anywhere. Unfortunately for Begala and Carville, they aren’t part of it.

You think Paul Begala and James Carville are not proud of the Democratic Party’s values and principles? That they are afraid to stand up for themselves? You think they argue against “50 state” because they just hate Dean and that they are scared of devolving power outside of the professional structures? Do you really think they never wanted to win, have completely sold out to corporations and are just fine with leaving a party in charge that is sending kids to die in the sand?

And right here is where I get offended. You, Scott the Blogger, perceive this struggle as a battle between the elite and the masses. This obviously puts me on the elite side, so I consider your swipe directed at me too. I’m pretty sure you hate me for no other reason than my being one of these elites. You blame me for losing to Bush in 2000 and 2004 and you will find every excuse to not look at historic things, like say, 9/11, to explain how R’s won in ‘02 and ‘04. You don’t think Iraq played as much of a role in ‘06 as the 50 state strategy. Heck, I’ll bet that if you ran for congress and I gave you my resume, you’d throw it away because it doesn’t have a list of the diaries I’d written or “netroots”-backed candidates I’ve worked for in the past.

And that is what bugs me: you hate me for being a professional, for making money doing this and, most of all, for not sharing your “damn them all to hell” and “if DC said it, it must be wrong” attitude. You claim to speak for the masses when you say these things but I’m pretty sure that you don’t know who the masses really are (here’s a hint: they don’t blog regularly).

So, in the upcoming power struggle for the leadership of this party (and it’s coming) we will have to see who’s really better at this game, Bloggers or the MSP. It’s the pros vs. the amateurs, the top-down vs. the bottom-up, the big guy vs. the little guys.

It’ll be interesting to watch and even more fun to play. Better bring your A-game, Scott. I’m pretty good at this.

As the election approaches next week, I thought it would be interesting enough to share their electronic exchanges here. They’ve promised to let me do so as long as I protect their anonymity, and that strikes me as a fair deal. (Just for the record, neither is Not Paul Begala.)

One is a veteran Democratic operative. The other worked for Howard Dean in Vermont. For the purposes of this post, we’ll call them Democratic Beltway Insider and Former Dean Staffer. Will only one survive? Will one trick the other into eating their own liver? Or tie the other’s tongue to a launching spaceship? Read on:

DBI: I know this sounds dumb, but what exactly is the bloggers’ problem with Rahm. He is one of the ONLY democrats who knows how to WIN. Is it because he knocked candidates who had no shot out in the primaries? Puleeze. I think we should have a 3rd party for all these people. The 50 state strategy is a Dean PR sham anyway. In [state redacted], [name redacted] used her 50 state $$ to hire a driver.

FDS: Yes the 50 state strategy is a sham. That’s why suddenly the Dems are competitive in states that 2 years ago all the insiders were saying the Dems should just forget about forever. Admit it, you’re a beltway insider.

DBI: Those races are not in play because Dean gave each state party some allowance money. Those races are in play because organizations like the DLCC, Emilys List and even Move On have been working with state and local candidates for cycles and recruiting. A lot of these races were set up to be competitive totally independent of anything the DNC has done. I may be an insider, but I’ve been around longer than the new DNC people and I remember stuff. Not to mention that Dems haven’t done shit to be competitive other than let the GOP hang themselves – the biggest and best reason that we have races in play that weren’t in 04. Case in point NC08.

FDS: Ok well if those races are competitive because Democratic groups like DLCC and Emily’s List get involved with them, that basically proves the 50-state strategy correct, that by competing everywhere you expand the playing field and give yourself more chances to win. Thank you for proving my point.

DBI: Not really. The DLCC and Emilys List have regional programs they’ve been running for a number of cycles. The DNC is spinning that handing chump change over to state parties is going to revive them – guess again. The reason EL’s plan works is because its not affiliated with the DNC or state parties at all. Talk about insiders and hacks. State operatives are often just small-time crooks.

FDS: Well clearly there is no way I convince you as long as you are have are massively in love with Emily’s list. I simply point to the results:

Pre-Dean: Democrats are a bunch of pansies who refuse to challenge Bush on anything, especially the war in Iraq

Post-Dean: Democrats revitalize their party by trashing Bush, particularly on the war in Iraq, and make the country realize how awful he is, giving Democrats a chance to win in places like Wyoming and Idaho where no one thought they should ever even compete again.

Last I checked Emily’s List has been around for quite a while, I’m not really sure what they did differently in the last three years that totally reversed the political tide in this country. Thank you Howard Dean.

DBI: You are so easy manipulated and that is the point. Dean is taking credit for turning the tide, for fixing these state parties. But what has HE done that you can honestly attribute to HIM and the DNC. I’ll tell you: spin.

You also just changed the point you were trying to make. Are we talking about the 50 state strategy per Dean or about whether Dean is more responsible than Emilys List for the electoral situation Dems find themselves in now?

One point about Emilys List: they made Rahm work for his seat. They poured money and bodies into Nancy Kazack’s primary to beat him, but he still pulled it out. He busted ass and it was impressive. You of all people should respect Emilys List because they began as an outsider group – opposed to the workings of the party. The DCCC was primarying women with men, so Emilys List was started as an alternative to the DCCC so women could run and not be undercut.

Here’s the point, groups other than Dean’s DNC have done Real work for a Long time to find good candidates and build infrastructure in the states. A one-time contribution from Dean that keeps the lights on has very little to do with this “sweep” we’re looking at.

A party chair should be able to Raise Money, or Get Votes, preferably both. I rarely see Dean do either. The value of a chair is to be able to and RAISE MONEY from REALLY RICH PEOPLE.

Wyoming and Idaho…. Yes, ID-01 was also potentially competitive in 2002 and I maxed out to the Dem candidate there, Betty Richardson. She ran a strong campaign and peeled off some Rs. If she had been running in this climate she would have won.

Democrats can really suck a lot. You’re right. But Howard Dean is not the reason they are sucking less. A lot of them don’t listen to a word he has to say. And I would venture…he won’t be around much longer.

FDS: I won’t claim that simply giving extra money and attention to state parties has had a massive impact in just two years, it takes longer than that to have an effect. But this election season is proving the premise behind Dean’s 50-state strategy to be totally right. Some of these states are going to be competitive for Democrats in 2008. Everyone seems to forget that in 2004 when Dean was saying we should compete in every state everyone was calling him an idiot and that all Dems money and resources should always be focused on the 15 swing states.

We’re going to see many more “swing states” in 2008, and more states will be truly competitive again, not because Dean gave $400,000 extra to the Virginia state party, but because the premise behind the 50-state strategy is 100% good long-term political strategy.

It’s just you beltway insiders stuck in the swing state mentality that don’t get it. (Yes I technically live inside the beltway, but I hate everything and everyone, so it’s not an issue for me)

BDI: It can be a great political tactic to jump on a tide, say you thought of it, and take credit for it. I mean, THAT, is like the one smart thing Dean has done.

FDS: Who’s jumping on a tide and SAYING he thought of it? He did think of it and he did start the tide. Oh no wait sorry, I forgot, John Kerry started the tide. He was so convincing with his shrewd and unafraid criticisms of Bush.

BDI: What are you missing about farm team work that I thought I explained. Top of the ticket doesn’t a tide make. Generic ballot – people are saying they prefer Dems right? But they frequently don’t associate their local representatives with the top of the ticket. This is calling ticket splitting and it happens a lot.

Shitting on Kerry is lame. Everyone thinks he sucked. Remember other Dems who won in spite of Kerry? He wasn’t going to fix the party. He was just trying to get the White House – different.

FDS: Dean blazed the trail and made it ok to attack Bush when everyone else was afraid to do it on a grand scale. The reason Dems have a resurgence is because they have been able to show the country how awful Bush is. Name me one Democrat that is more responsible for the party going after Bush than Dean was. Go ahead, name ‘em.

BDI: McCain [Editor's note: Just to be clear, BDI knows well that McCain is a Republican.]

FDS: A) McCain is not a Democrat, B) McCain has gotten closer and closer to Bush each year.

BDI: It’s not ok to trash Bush as a Dem when it wont help you. The political environment has changed only because GOPers have fucked up so bad. Liberal is still a dirty word in middle America. No thanks to Dean. Like I said, talking points aren’t about instinct. They’re about strategy and polling.

FDS: A) It is ok to trash Bush as a Dem when it won’t help you, because that shows you have strength and principles, and if you’re criticisms are right, you can convince people of that in the end.

B) No one would know that the GOP fucked up so bad if someone in the Democratic party hadn’t said they were fucking up. I have still yet to hear you name a Dem who was more responsible for the Dems stopping from shitting their pants and getting the guts to go after Bush.

BDI: A: Maybe in Vermont

B: Rahm Emanuel

FDS: A) Oh lord. Well I stand by my claim that making the strong and principled argument will win people over to your side in the mid-range to long-term. You keep saying that winning a one seat in Arizona-7 is more important than the direction of the party for years ahead

B) Yes that’s right I distinctly remember Rahm Emanuel being all over the news launching heavy criticisms of Bush back in 2003….oh wait, no I don’t.

BDI: A – try that crap in Virginia and see what you get.

FDS: A) We did try it in Virginia and look what it’s got us: Jim Webb about to win a Senate seat, and several Dems poised to win heavy Republican districts

B) I’m still Googling to find those stinging criticism Emanuel was making of Bush before it became safe to. Having some trouble finding them though.

BDI: Not really. Bush and Allen got Webb there. Its not how Warner won. And his effect on the state has been bigger than anything Dean has done.

The whole premise of your argument is unproven and I disagree. You want to take a chance and push a scientifically unpopular msg because you think you’re right and that people will eventually come around to your way of seeing things.

FDS: The premise of my argument is not unproven, it’s been proven already. Bush began dropping from high to crappy approval ratings when Democrats go the balls to go after him.

BDI: And did they go after him because Dean thought it was a cool idea? Or because Bush pushed the public too far, they started to turn on him, it was evident in polling and focus groups, on the ground, etc and Dems concretely knew it was a strong message?

This has been entertaining but I have to sign off and do some work.

FDS: Ah yes, the Dems besides Dean started to turn on him after polling and focus groups showed it would work. Polling and focus groups, polling and focus groups. That’s how you get the country on your side, just don’t do anything at all until the public eventually gets sick of what they have.

Well I think I’ve managed to pretty much refute every single point made here, my job is done. I’m going to spend the rest of my afternoon pouring through Google to see if I can find these stinging criticisms you claim Emanuel was making about Bush while Bush was still popular. It might take a while….or forever.

BDI: Well, I suggest you run a campaign and try to get elected without listening to the electorate. Interesting concept. For a dictator or a Bush.

FDS: No point in trying to convince the electorate that our position is right, let’s just wait until the polling shows they have settled on it by default.

BDI: Sure. Tin ear. Always effective. No accountability to those who may disagree with you. The way to win people over is not to tell them something they aren’t interested in hearing.

Now really. I have to stop. You can send one more email so you can make sure you have the last word ok?

So there you have it. I guess only one question is left: Which one is Itchy, and which one is Scratchy?

I would be willing to bet that bloggers are more “satisfied” folks than most people. They get to expunge the vitriol that inevitably builds up from day after day of reading the simplistic rantings of unqualified morons. We the frequent readers miss out on this catharsis and sit here, perpetually pent-up and ready to throw our computers, phones and cats at the wall in frustration at people who don’t know what they are writing about. Guess I need to blog more often — so thanks to Blog P.I. for allowing me this chance to vent.

My subject is the “influential blogger” (as Matt Bai points out) Chris Bowers and the utter stupidity he posted today on MyDD. Bowers is upset that the DCCC is spending too much money in red districts because if we were to win there, the majority might not last as long as if we focused on more blue districts. Set aside the fact that most Democratic bloggers have called for a 50-state strategy (see Bowers’ 2004 post, “Fifty State Strategy”) (and by extension, 435-district strategy) and consider this, from today:

“Over the past three months, by a count of 3-1 the DCCC has spent its resources in Republican-held red districts. We need to be spending much more money in blue districts that will be easier to defend, and produce Democrats more likely to stay with the majority of the caucus on difficult votes.”

What pisses me off to no end about this is the macro look this moron just took at winning the House — as if you can tell by the Partisan Voter Index (supplied by Cook Political Report) how easy it is to win a district. Or how he just forgets conveniently that Red districts have leanings where it’s much easier to define a Democrat as a liberal, pussy, God-hating yuppie. It takes money in mail, TV, research and polling to fend some of this stuff off.

So, allow me to comment on every race he lists and why the DCCC spends what it does:

RED DISTRICTS
• AZ-08: $445,210.71. PVI: Republican +1.4
  Hey idiot, they dropped $350K in the primary trashing the Republican they would have a harder time beating and hit the jackpot — getting the conservative crackpot — so this is a safe pickup. Money well spent.
• IL-06: $82,946.87. PVI: Republican +2.9
  It’s about a half million a week to run TV here, and it shows. They’ve spent a $100K compared to the NRCC’s $500K? You call that overspending in Red districts?
• IN-02: $319,879.08. PVI: Republican +4.3
• IN-08: $833,899.63. PVI: Republican +8.5
• IN-09: $83,428.98. PVI: Republican +7.1
  All Indiana districts are a good investment — local dislike of Mitch “The Blade” Daniels plus prevailing national winds makes it the best time ever to get these seats. And the reason there’s $800K in 08? Hostettler has $70K on hand, and he doesn’t raise money because he knows the NRCC will save his butt. They hate him, we love him. And we’re lucky Sodrel hasn’t decided to millionaire the shit out of us in 09, cause he can do that you know. That $80K is cheap so far.
• KY-04: $13,833.64. PVI: Republican +11.7
  Spending is actually low here for a Cincy media market, but it will come.
• NY-24: $390,447.98. PVI: Republican +0.6
  It’s an open seat for fuck’s sake, if you don’t spend the money, the NRCC defines you. Do you want that?
• NC-11: $118,496.90. PVI: Republican +7.1
  They’ve actually laid off here, again, I think, waiting to buy broadcast.
• OH-15: $52,832.64. PVI: Republican +1.1
  See NC-11.
• PA-10: $259,195.99. PVI: Republican +8.0
  Every dollar spent here draws two dollars from the NRCC because they’re defending a guy who choked his girlfriend.
• VA-02: $129,493.94. PVI: Republican +5.9
  This is probably some polling and mail. They’re not sure they can do anything here until they think the Senate race is in play.
• WI-08: $275,778.90. PVI: Republican +3.7
  Again, they have to respond to the NRCC if they want to keep this race in play. The open-seat challenger had zero money to respond to TV.

Total: $3,005,445.26

BLUE DISTRICTS
• CO-07: $118,907.65 PVI: Democratic +2.3
  Why spend money when the Dem is going to win and has money?
• FL-22: $135,800.60. PVI: Democratic +3.6
  They’re waiting to buy broadcast TV in Miami. That shit ain’t cheap.
• IA-01: $357,042.22– PVI: Democratic +4.8
  This is a pickup, through and through. The Dem who won the primary
  was broke, so they had to fill in for him.
• NM-01: $230,526.42 PVI: Democratic +2.4
  That’s a pretty good investment, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. This is New Mexico, not New York.
• PA-06: $102,239.29 PVI: Democratic +2.2
  See FL-22. TV is expensive, especially Philly TV.
• WA-08: $28,204.03. PVI: Democratic +2.3
  You have to believe you can win before you spend money and they’re just not there yet. Plus, the NRCC hasn’t gone in and played, that signals how the D-Trip reacts to this race.

Total: $972,720.21

Another annoying thing is Bowers’ unexplained selectivity: He failed to include the other two PA contests, the three CT races, plus IA-03, GA-12 and IL-08. But what will all those show you? Not much else but that each race has multiple factors that determine spending. You know those challengers that started out a whole year in advance had plenty of time to raise resources for some of these fights. That determines spending, too. The point is, local shit matters. The story of each race matters. Macro analysis is not enough.

Now, my work done here, I can get back to the tedious job of trying to send Dems to Congress and building back up to the point of having to refute these fools again.