But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

Apart from the auto-launching pre-roll ad—I tried and failed to pull this off DVR myself—not too shabby: I got two sound bites, the final conclusion restated in the reporter’s words, and some hilarious B-roll which is clearly the two of us shooting B-roll. Enjoy.

Supporters at the press conference included Stanford professor Larry Lessig, former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, environmental activist Van Jones, a venture capitalist from the firm which first funded Twitter, Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Josh Silver from Free Press. That’s the same Josh Silver I criticized back in May for claiming the only real news was his kind of news.

Also on the panel: Republican consultant David All, whom I count as a friend and whose work on Slatecard I admire but with whom I disagree on some matters of policy and partisanship. I’m not the first to note the incongruity of this panel; if you happened to check out the comments at All’s TechRepublican starting this weekend, Mike Turk initiated a very interesting debate with All on the merits of the group continuing through today.

David has called Internet for Everyone a “bipartisan” organization, which Turk has also called into question. All’s claim seems very hard to justify, based on the names above. For one thing, the only other reference to Internet for Everyone as “bi-partisan” comes from Brian Reich at Fast Company — who is, coincidentally, a former Gore campaign aide. Meanwhile Tim Karr of Free Press didn’t bother to include the word “bipartisan” in his announcement at Huffington Post.

But I was reminded of a tweet from @DavidAll the evening the conference ended:

And in a post on Saturday, All did concede that the bipartisanship of the group was tenuous:

As one of the only Republicans in the coalition (Vint Cerf of Google is a registered Republican), I believe it’s crucial for Republicans to embrace a national broadband strategy.

Curious about Vint Cerf’s Republican bona fides, I decided to punch his name into OpenSecrets.org. For the sake of column width, I’ve removed his employers (principally MCI, MCI Worldcom, Worldcom and Google). Here’s what I found:

Finally! Proof that Vint Cerf is a Republican. Well, maybe he was once a Republican. And so, David’s claim that the Internet was Republican from the beginning has a fighting chance. But Cerf is clearly not a Republican now, in fact he has been quite an active Democrat since approximately the Reagan administration.

There are certainly times when cross-ideological partnerships are a good idea, such as when Redstate’s Mike Krempasky, Adam Bonin and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos came together to fend off campaign finance restrictions on bloggers. But it concerns me that David All — one of the C&E-recognized rising stars of GOP Washington — is giving ideological cover to an organization which is not just non-conservative and not just un-conservative, but whose basic idea treats limited government and market-based solutions as beneath discussion.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t dissuade him from watching the rest of The Wire.

Classic hit job

against the New York Senator. Over the last 24 hours, I’ve seen a few more examples of this Clinton-Obama feud playing out across the leftosphere. For exampe, here’s Big Tent Democrat (aka Armando of Daily Kos) on TalkLeft:

Josh Marshall seems incapable of taking Hillary Clinton’s words at their face value. It seems clear that TPM is intent on ignoring the important part of this story, the pattern of sexism at NBC. This remains a very disappointing episode for TPM, both as a question of journalism and simple decency.

But Marshall isn’t the only progressive blogging entrepreneur taking friendly fire; here’s former Edwards staffer Melissa McEwan at Shakesville:

Dear Arianna,

I know you hate Hillary Clinton and everything, but do you—mother to two daughters—really believe that the best way to undermine her candidacy is by giving Stephen “Mickey’s Brother” Kaus space on your pages to unleash a misogynistic tirade against Hillary, that manages to simultaneously dismiss the concerns of women everywhere who have raised red flags over the sexist treatment of Hillary by the media?

And then there is the extreme difference of opinion over Paul Krugman’s latest anti-Obama jeremiad, wherein he accuses the Obama campaign of being like “Nixonland,” after a 1956 Adlai Stevenson quote. Ironic, considering not just the Clinton campaign’s duplicity (say, campaigning in Florida) but also the existence of the term Hillaryland.

From Tennessee Guerrilla Women, Kevin Hayden and Susie Madrak agreeing with Krugman to Hilzoy, State of the Day and Ron Chusid pretty much going WTF, the left is split along Obama-Clinton lines, and they are split almost evenly.

But are they split so badly they cannot put their differences aside once the nomination has been decided? I doubt it. Their ire is not directed at the other candidate as it is directed at the other candidate’s supporters. Rifts may persist among the bloggers themselves, but it’s difficult to see how that translates into weaker support for the eventual Democratic nominee.

A hearty congrats to all featured, and I think my colleague the Virginia delegate to QandO may be quoted in the piece. Yet the pay wall leaves me wondering. As a resister of all things Star Trek (and sympathizer with K-Lo at The Corner on this) I’m not sure if I should be envious; Matt Lewis’s Town Hall commenters are pretty harsh, and not just the Ronulans.

But the article isn’t public, so I can’t judge for myself, nor can bloggers or their commentariats. C&E publishes much of its content on the website, but right now there is a little symbol next to the one article that’s actually about bloggers. Who are the ad wizards at C&E who came up with this one?

I also wonder if the falling out between David and Erick (and others) from a few months back gets any inches. My guess is not, and even if I’m wrong, it makes me think it’s too bad Wonkette doesn’t report on its city’s industry in the same depth as Valleywag (retooled in early 2007) or even Gawker (retooling, but not pulled).

Certainly the Beltway and the District is as much a company town as the Silicon Valley/Palo Alto, so where’s the 100-word-version? Someone, please, quote the key grafs in a blog post. Make it so.

And to tell the truth, I probably watched ST:TNG on afternoon television for at least thee years in middle school.

Update: I have now read the article, and I am pleasantly surprised that the kerfuffle noted above is indeed covered, and that author Walter Alarkon even used the word “kerfuffle.” Aside from the annoying Star Trek motif and an embarrassingly lame pull quote, the article does a reasonably good job of explaining the current challenges Republican web strategists face. If the piece brings a wider awareness to these issues, it’ll have done all it needs to.

You can read the article here in the original layout; thanks to Theodora in the comments for bringing it to my attention. Still, the snazzy NXTbook software (which doesn’t even live on the C&E page) features no plain text, so it’s next to invisible to search engines. Likewise, it doesn’t let you copy and paste, so it’s next to useless for blogging.

Updated again: In the comments, it has been pointed out that there is an XML page running in the background, so it’s not a total SEO disaster. Meanwhile, Rob Bluey is weighing in…

I wasn’t going to post it, but I feel the need to set the record straight. For starters, I hate Star Trek.

It’s good enough that I tend to think that just by eyeballing it you can tell how big a particular story is. If that’s the case, then the Michael O’Hanlon/Kenneth Pollack op-ed in today’s New York Times may be the most talked-about newspaper article this year, at least:

Unlike many, perhaps most, stories listed by Memeorandum this one attracted attention from both the pro-war/conservative/righty bloggers as well as the anti-war/progressive/lefty bloggers. If you’ve read the op-ed, it’s not hard to see why. O’Hanlon and Pollack both supported the Iraq war at the outset — the latter expressly advocating it in an influential book — but changed their minds as the war continued and the rebuilding project went awry. Nowadays the right is grateful for any sign that the war might be winnable, especially if it comes from Democratic-aligned intellectuals, especially if it runs on the New York Times’ left-leaning op-ed page. Meanwhile, the left has at least as much invested in ending the very same war that the right wishes to continue, in discrediting Pollack and O’Hanlon’s work, by pointing out inconsistencies and oversights, not to mention disputing their anti-war credentials.

It is not, however, an even split.

So who wins this battle of wills? Well, if you trust Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s secret sauce, and you trust my count (I’ve included the complete breakdown after the jump, if you’re feeling argumentative), and we focus on this iteration of the page (there were others), several more large blogs of the right hopped on this story than blogs of the left tried to burst it like a bubble: 37 to 18, with 10 online newspaper items and non-aligned bloggers making up the oft-overlooked third leg of the blogospheric debate. Still, take this with a grain of salt — The Huffington Post has more traffic than many of these blogs put together, while righty traffic leader Instapundit linked it approvingly, but as usual offered too little commentary to make the cut. And in the course of writing this, I have seen more than a few perfectly major blogs not linked here — but I still think it’s a pretty good representation.

If there’s nothing else to be said here, it’s a fitting story to capture (political) blogosphere-wide attention — the rightosphere came to be after 9/11 and to support war on terrorism, of which Iraq is consdidered a piece, while the leftosphere was built around opposition to the invasion, and frustration with moderate liberals who supported it — like, say, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.

OK, so here’s the complete list. Feel free to tell me where I’m wrong:

• Tapscott’s Copy Desk
• Max Boot / Commentary
• Hindrocket / Power Line
• Brian Faughnan / Weekly Standard
• Gateway Pundit
• Steve Schippert / The Tank
• Ross Douthat / The Atlantic Online
• Dean Barnett / Townhall.com
• Noel Sheppard / NewsBusters.org
• Ann Althouse
• Cardinalpark / TigerHawk
• baldilocks
• Armed Liberal / Winds of Change.NET
• Rick Moran / Right Wing Nut House
• Wretchard / The Belmont Club
• Cassandra / Villainous Company
• Pejman Yousefzadeh / A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days
• Spree / Wake up America
• Bryan / Hot Air
• Rob Bluey / Bluey Blog
• Tom Maguire / JustOneMinute
• Marc / USS Neverdock
• BLACKFIVE
• AJStrata / The Strata-Sphere
• Jimmie / The Sundries Shack
• Jim Geraghty / The Campaign Spot
• Jules Crittenden
• Clayton Cramer
• Lex / Neptunus Lex
• Ken McCracken / WILLisms.com
• Curt / Flopping Aces
• Frank J. / Right Wing News
• McQ / QandO
• Ed Morrissey / Captain’s Quarters
• Robbie / UrbanGrounds
• Dr. Sanity
• Gaius / Blue Crab Boulevard

Anti-war/Progressive/Lefty

• Think Progress
• Cernig / The Newshoggers
• Joseph A. Palermo / The Huffington Post
• Robert Farley / Lawyers, Guns and Money
• Greg Sargent / Election Central
• Kathy / Shakespeare’s Sister
• The Agonist
• Steve M. / No More Mister Nice Blog
• Cactus / Angry Bear
• The Carpetbagger Report
• Upyernoz / rubber hose
• Undeniable Liberal / WTF Is It Now??
• Taylor Marsh
• Connecting.the.Dots
• Ron Beasley / Middle Earth Journal
• Atrios / Eschaton
• John Cole / Balloon Juice
• Juan Cole / Informed Comment

News item/Moderate/Non-aligned

• William Rees-Mogg / Times of London
• Reuters
• The Independent
• Frank James / The Swamp
• Thomas P.M. Barnett
• Zzaki / Political Punch
• BBC
• Jay Carney / TIME: Swampland
• Justin Gardner / Donklephant
• Pete Abel / The Moderate Voice

Pop quiz — can you guess who switched sides? If you give up, the answer is here.

There are lines one could plausibly draw between those who serve on a campaign’s staff exclusively and those outsiders who consult with that campaign and others simultaneously, or between speech and actions which are germane to one’s campaign responsibilities and those which are not. But if these lines do exist, they don’t seem to be obeyed these days — everything that anyone connected with a campaign (in any way) does, says or writes is being attributed back to the campaign, and campaigns will continue to be be called upon to disavow, and there may be calls for more people’s heads, etc.

This, my dear bloggers, is why you don’t see more of us pros blogging. We eventually get our bosses into trouble.

Mentioned in the article is Obama General Counsel Bob Bauer’s thoughts on pardoning Libby. I have to say, I was mad when I saw the title, but I like Bob’s logic. I’m all for laying this at Bush’s feet. You game?

In few communities has the outsize influence of the Ronbots (borrowing more from “Romneybot” than “Rahmbot” here) been felt more than fast-rising social news website Digg. Digg is a prize target for manipulators — getting listed on the front page all but guarantees a tidal wave of traffic headed toward the submitted link. After repeated revisions to the algorithm, it apparently remains no less vulnerable.

Paul supporters have been moving stories onto the front page for a couple weeks now, and while I found it curious and somewhat amusing, Diggers are quirky and I didn’t find it illegitimate or overly distracting — that is, until this morning.

Check out the top five stories, as of about 7:30 Eastern time:

Those top three are not quite all the same story, but they are certainly variations on a theme. Note also the separation in digg totals with the next two, non-Paul submissions. And considering Paul’s negligible support in meatspace, one gets the distinct impression that the system has been gamed.

Others have suggested that his online support is manufactured. I don’t think that’s the case. Click through the headlines (here, here and here), take a look at the comments and the digging (voting) histories of the users submitting them (here, here and here). They may all be acting in concert, but there’s no reason to believe these are not legitimate members — two of the three submitters signed up last summer.

But even if they are acting sincerely, this is simply not what the vast majority of users go to to Digg for. The website is at its best when it provides variety. Forerunner Slashdot has codified this as “The Omelette,” but Digg manages to create this organically. Most of the time.

To cherry pick just one comment out of the third story, here is user 9Digits throwing up his hands:

I’m an anti-war Republican, and I still find your candidate’s campaign to be goddamn annoying. If these are the type of supporters he’s got, there’s not a chance in hell I’ll vote for him.

This follows the Ronbots’ success in compelling ABC News to add their candidate to an online poll. That doesn’t bother me so much, except as ABC knew well, the poll was about to be freeped. But it also follows Charles Johnson’s decision to delist Paul from his online poll at Little Green Footballs. To whatever degree ABC News has an obligation to create a level playing field, even one that they know will be gamed, Johnson has less of one.

And yet that still says more about the general uselessness of online polls than about Paul’s supporters. Is the backlash unfair? Perhaps it would be, if they didn’t seem so prone to the same kind of vitriol that sometimes still causes trouble for their counterparts on the left.

If Paul’s supporters are willing to take the effort to game online communities not already predisposed to isolationist libertarianism they should be willing to accept the consequences. That certainly means their own ostracism — but it also risks creating the impression that Paul’s support is manufactured. And especially in politics, people don’t like being played.

Hi. I’m Phil. I did it. And I’m proud of it.

He’s Phillip de Vellis and he’s now formerly with Blue State Digital. They made the right call in letting him go, already handling this with more confidence (not to mention web savvy) than EchoDitto did with their resident McCainiac, Nicco Mele. Apart from getting fired, de Vellis will probably emerge a winner. Unless, of course, Hillary Clinton actually wins the presidency.

But this isn’t the first time Phil de Vellis been suspected of surrepititous intra-party hacking hackery. The name stuck out to me because I reported on that alleged subterfuge early last year, when de Vellis was with the Sherrod Brown Senate campaign. The details are too tedious to recount here, but an IP address associated with the Brown campaign was identified as the source of some nasty comments — and some Ohio bloggers accused de Vellis of being responsible.

You can read the full back story here and here, but this will do:

[C]omments from anonymous users with names like Thisblogishorseshit and JewsforJesus started making antagonistic comments. Both suspected Brown’s new Internet spokesperson and blogger Philip de Vellis. (Brown oversees the pro-Dem blog Grow Ohio.) De Vellis was a recent hire, and had been dispatched to put Brown’s side of the story on the blogs. They couldn’t prove de Vellis had done so. Their evidence was circumstantial at best — with one big exception.

[Blogger Russell] Hughlock compared the IP address on the comments to the IP address from e-mails he’d previously received from de Vellis — and found an exact match. We contacted the Brown campaign ourselves about it, and while they were reticent to discuss accusations made by bloggers aligned with their opponent, they did take partial responsibility for the postings. De Vellis denied being the author, and pointed out the IP address listed on the comments serve the entire staff of about 30, but the campaign has acknowledged that the comments did indeed originate from their office. De Vellis said he was certain no one on Brown’s Internet team had posted any of the messages, but said: “We haven’t done an in-depth investigation.” Rather, the Brown campaign quietly circulated a policy memo: Interns and staffers may no longer contribute to any blog save for Grow Ohio. This is a direction other campaigns will follow, lest they have to learn the same lesson.

Who knows if De Vellis was responsible for the furtive comments back then. But I’d say the last sentence holds up pretty well.

P.S. Buckeye State Blog, who remembers him as well but not fondly, doubts de Vellis’ authorship claim: “Phil claims he made it? I say don’t buy everything you read.”

P.P.S. Joe Tobacco points out in a comment on this post and at Cadillac Tight that Jerome Armstrong points out today that he personally hired de Vellis for the Brown campaign. He stands by de Vellis, and is unhappy with Blue State Digital for letting him go:

I know the founders of Blue State Digital, and this was a petty move on their part– an over-reaction to say the least. Phil’s a big reason why Sherrod Brown kicked ass in Ohio in 2006, he made a remarkable video adaption, and BSD could have simply said they accept his resignation.

As I argued last summer, statements like this lead me to doubt Armstrong is as savvy as he’s given credit for. And just like that time, one only need look to the first comment of that very MyDD post for a more practical assessment:

This baseless, pointless ad divides the Democratic Party, and undermines Clinton’s chances if she eventually wins the nomination.

And as to the firing itself, Krempasky is spot on:

[W]hen it became clear that an employee made the video, given their client base and relationships – it makes total sense to sack him.

Does Armstrong understand that Obama is more important to BSD than Phil de Vellis? Maybe Armstrong didn’t give it that much thought. But maybe that’s why it’s so easy to dismiss him.

Supporters have contributed just $81 toward [Hillary Clinton's] campaign on the affiliated grass-roots funding site ActBlue, compared with well over $1 million for Mr. Edwards.

That comes from Amy Schatz in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, but let’s not pick on her exclusively — as Not Paul Begala pointed out here a few weeks back, Chris Cillizza just made the same mistake at The Fix. Which, ironically, has itself not been fixed.

For those of you just tuning in: ActBlue is no longer just a nifty website that lets bloggers raise money from their own page. No, it has become a full-fledged vendor for legitimate candidates. Edwards is one; Sen. Clinton is not. Every dollar that goes through Edwards’ website gets added to the ActBlue total [Update: Not exactly; see this comment], and not everybody with a keyboard and a credit card is “netroots.”

Attention, readers! If you see other examples of ActBlue fundraising totals for Edwards (or Bill Richardson) being touted as evidence of strength among the online activists, let us know. This notion deserves to be squashed before yet another mainstream political reporter falls victim.

Meanwhile, Simon Owens at Bloggasm adds another fifteen seconds to the Edwards blogger fiasco by interviewing the one that got away, Lindsay Beyerstein, who imagines herself in Marcotte’s shoes:

I don’t know whether I would have ultimately resigned or not. I don’t think so–unless I was under immense pressure to do so from inside the campaign. I’m just stubborn that way. Resigning would have meant conceding. On the other hand, resignation might have been the best thing for the campaign. Personally, I think that the furor would have died down eventually when people realized that a campaign blogger just blogs press releases and not their own stuff.

Assuming that blogger wasn’t concurrently posting at her (or his) own site, perhaps so. And if the first part of her answer didn’t cause visions of a six-week public relations nightmare swallowing the campaign like the Book of Exodus — albeit a less-plausible scenario, as Beyerstein manages to do progressive feminism without the four-letter words — another part of the interview should give pause. The part where she explains how she ended up writing about the experience of her non-experience for Salon:

Amanda wrote about her experiences in Salon. They published one of my photos to illustrate Amanda’s article. So, I emailed Amanda and asked her which editor she worked with for the article. Then, I wrote to the editor and pitched the story.

Just as story was about to go away, no less. With online allies like these, maybe John Edwards should get a dog.

I guess now is as good a time as any to revisit the subject of ABC PAC. Earlier this year I criticized the venture as insufficiently derivative of ActBlue, which understandably vexed some of those involved.

As another of those involved, Heritage’s Robert Bluey, put it shortly after,

The folks at ABC PAC should take that advice and start by hiring a full-time executive director on par with Benjamin Rahn, president of ActBlue. Without anyone in charge, ABC PAC is doomed for failure.

As far as I am aware, nothing has changed with the project in the intervening period. So, how is ABC PAC is doing now?

It’s still a centrally-planned draft movement for several candidates who have already entered the race and some who never will (no Fred Thompson, yes Mike Bloomberg?) from the same team that brought you McCain’s phony social network, and the total raised has itself risen just $87 in three months.

The cycle is long and the future is unknown, so I cannot declare the venture a failure. However, it would not be inaccurate to call the website “failing.”