That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.

Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:

This certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)

Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.

Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.

To begin, here’s erstwhile conservative John Cole making the former point:

Here is what I don’t understand about twitter. When blogs came out and started to rise in popularity, lots of folks in the MSM and elsewhere said “Great. Just what we need. The undigested, unedited thoughts of the rabble.” If blogs are the undigested thoughts, tweets are the orts.

Here’s Bloggingheads regular commenter B.J. Keefe, responding to new host Matt Lewis’ point — via my post here — that the Right is succeeding on Twitter:

Is this anything worth bragging about? What does it even mean, that there are more Republicans spewing out sound bites and ill-considered thoughtlets? … [G]iven the choice to “dominate” on Twitter compared to, say, the blogosphere, let alone actually getting people off their couches to go knock on doors, I know which one I’d pick.

Even as Markos Moulitsas has recently taken to Twitter, at least one Daily Kos community member decided to hoax the TCOT list about the contents of the stimulus bill — “$2 million for Shamwows” — and with some success, too. (On the other hand, this guy makes a good point.) And here is Gavin M. from Sadly, No!:

Twitter is that new thing that’s like burping the alphabet. Republicans are big on it because they have nothing to say.

He is being glib (what? impossible) but this is a trend, all right. What’s driving this attitude? We can’t ignore sour grapes — for the first time in a while, the Right is being recognized as doing something online better than the Left. It only makes sense the Left would want to minimize that, both to reassure themselves, discourage the Right and encourage skepticism among outside observers.

It’s absolutely true that, by itself, Twitter is a stunted communication tool. The brevity allows for faster communication, which also means less context and a greater likelihood of jumping to conclusions. Then again, the value of each individual tweet is infinitessimal and easily countered (the so-called “self-correcting blogosphere” in fact wasn’t, but the Twitterverse may be different).

Of course, there is a lot more to Twitter than 140 characters, thanks to its API and developer community. For those who may have not been following it closely, Twitpic lets you share pictures. Power Twitter embeds those photos (and links to YouTube) on the page. Utterli lets you post audio. Services like Bit.ly make it easy to track clicks on links you post. Both Farhad Manjoo and David Weinberger have recently explained how Twitter users have compensated for its limitations.

Twitter’s homepage famously asks “What are you doing?” but, famously as well I think, the vast majority of Twitter users ignore this question and say whatever they think needs to be said. Twitter is what you make of it.

Because the Left has seized higher ground on the wider blogosphere, the Right has turned its focus to Twitter, and Rob Neppell’s TCOT has helped them organize things like the aforementioned Tea Parties. Of course, this is why the Right went to the blogosphere eight years ago: they perceived the mainstream media as being controlled by the Left. There is obviously a pattern here, and it owes to the Right often considering itself in an oppositional role to the prevailing culture. (This is the same reason why the right-wing editorial positions of the tabloid New York Post and tabloid-y Fox News are so compelling: being oppositional is controversial and being controversial is fun.)

Interestingly, the Left turned to blogs in 2004 because they had lost an election and felt the media had turned against them, too. The difference is that the Left did not have a grievance culture already, and so had to create one. They did, and much of the credit for this has to go to Media Matters, whose founder David Brock literally wrote the book on The Republican Noise Machine.

The knock from lefty bloggers used to be (and still sometimes is) that conservative blogs didn’t have comment sections, supposedly because they couldn’t abide the awful things left-wing bloggers imagined right-wing commenters would say in such comment sections (even as conservative bloggers were making a cottage industry of cherry-picking the most outlandish comments out of Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the like). Now with Twitter the complaint seems to be entirely the opposite: It’s all just chatter, there is no message to convey, &c. It’s one giant comment section.

But which is it? Well, it’s kind of both, right? Instapundit’s blog has long resembled a Twitter feed: short blasts of information with a link to longer commentary elsewhere, maybe a point of commentary and sometimes a photo as well. Twitter makes it possible for many more people (if not literally anyone) to be a clearinghouse of information for news and opinion, with Twitter itself nearly being a middleman like Google. The most-followed accounts on TCOT have tens of thousands of followers, and those with far fewer followers can specialize.

Why is this different from the blogosphere? It all has to do with the platform itself. In fact, it has a lot to do with the fact that Twitter is a single platform. Consider trackbacks, which were once supposed to be a way for bloggers to let other bloggers know they had linked to one of their posts. There was never a standard for trackbacks because blogs could be on Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or any other CMS or even be hand-coded, and so they never quite worked. But Twitter’s Replies tab (or as it’s been lately renamed, @USERNAME) works like a charm. Likewise, the column of recent tweets from those you follow provides a sense that others are reading what you write moments after you have said (tweeted) it.

Let me be clear: I do not mean that Twitter will grant everyone who signs up an Instapundit-like following. What I do mean is that by streamlining communication, Twitter significantly lowers the barriers to moving stories the way Glenn Reynolds does. And so few have shut down their blogs entirely; instead they are using Twitter to promote what they write in longer form there. The Twitterverse has not so much replaced the blogosphere as it has brought it closer together.

And yet Twitter’s efficacy as a communications medium is being questioned, too.

There’s a story going around lately — see TechCrunch, for example — about Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution.” If you’re not familiar with the situation, a series of anti-government protests in the Eastern European country have been widely perceived — see also CNN, for example — as being largely organized on Twitter.

Interestingly, this is probably not what really happened. The case has been made, persuasively to my mind, that Twitter’s user base in Moldova is too small to have been useful, and that so-ten-minutes-ago Facebook and decidedly unhip LiveJournal likely played a bigger role. It so happens this argument is primarily being made by blogs associated with the Left.

This is fine insofar as it seems to be a fair point about the case in question. But I suspect it may also also fuel the dismissal of Twitter on its own terms. Twitter may not have been the tech of choice this time, but that seems to be more about Moldova and less about Twitter. After all, it was already key to early news coverage of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Imagine if Twitter had been around on July 7, 2005, where mobile phones were used to convey images from the scene. Had Twitter (not to mention Twitpic and Qik and the iPhone) existed then, more images, sounds and even video would have been posted quickly, aiding police and rescue workers.

Just because it wasn’t necessarily Twitter this time does not mean that it won’t be involved next. Of course a Twitter message can be cluttered with @s and hashtags, but the tweet is not always the last word or the end of the line. It’s more medium than message.

The Left should not be so quick to scoff about Twitter. If they laugh it off and fail to develop networks and innovative uses, they will fall behind, appearing relatively disconnected and even slow. Likewise, the Right should not rest on what it has already created, as it did by not continuing to improve its blog-based infrastructure following the 2004 election. If TCOT is the extent of the Right’s innovation on Twitter, they’re toast as well.

Neither Huffington Post nor Twitter are making any money right now, but if I had to choose one, I’d definitely pick the latter.

Photograph of Moldova protest via Cornel Ciobanu/EPA.

“Everyone looks at the numbers and says, ‘Wow, advertising is growing 20 percent a year online,’ and they get really excited about that,” he said. “But most of that growth is cost-per-click — it’s Google, it’s AdWords, it’s AdSense. So display advertising stopped growing a year ago, and the problem is the number of impressions online doubles roughly every year, and so you have this gigantic overhang of supply, and demand has not only stopped growing anyway but is also definitely down in a commercial sense. Put it all together and it’s kind of a perfect storm.”

I asked him whether the Democratic administration and the billions of dollars in increased government spending were providing any new markets for ad buys. He wouldn’t discuss the specifics but confirmed that they were seeing some strong pockets of interests in affected industries and interest groups.

The closing of Pajamas Media, Copeland said, was definitely good for Blogads. When the conservative network launched, it managed to swipe several major conservative bloggers, leaving only a handful of the larger ones behind. Copeland told me that, starting in April, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin will be returning to Blogads.

Indeed michellemalkin.com is back from Pajamas Media. Of two display slots on her site, one ad is running in the $450/week slot, though the $1,500 premium slot remains unfilled. However, this pattern could be seen long before the recession hit, and it’s always been my suspicion that the premium account is meant to sticker-shock buyers into believing the lower slot a bargain, while making the occasional big score from a flush-with-cash advertiser buying out the category.

I digress.

The Malkin-owned Hot Air however is not coming back to Blogads, not yet if at all. That site is running Google display ads as well as ads from Intermarkets, which handles Drudge Report and a few other political sites with less-Niagaran traffic.

Also quoted in Owens’ column is Chris Bowers of Open Left, who also goes through Blogads. Here’s what ad column on his site looked like on Friday:

I say that because as of Saturday afternoon, they’ve thrown a display ad that wasn’t in there before. Those displays can’t be bringing in a great deal of money. I’ll bet more than anything they’re running just to keep up the appearance of healthy advertising, and hopefully lure other advertisers into the column.

Meanwhile back on Bowers’ former site, MyDD, Jerome Armstrong is keeping the lights on with Google ads, Jane Hamsher’s CommonSense Media and something I’ve never heard of called Pulse 360 that nonetheless has an impressive network. Its Blogads slot remains on the site, unfilled. Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. At Daily Kos, long one of Blogads’ top earners, Markos Moulitsas has had a diversified pool of ads for some time; today premium Blogads slot is unfilled, one flash-based display ad occupies the (almost-identically placed) lower slot, and just one traditional Blogad (JPG/GIF + a few lines of text) is running (pictured at right). That’s Markos Moulitsas’ latest book, as if you needed me to tell you that. I presume that Daily Kos today is earning significantly less than its election-season peak.

What about Blog P.I.? I haven’t sold a Blogads slot in months, but then again, I almost never do. My traffic may be better than Michael “Heckuva Job” Brownie’s, but I consistently rank near or at the bottom of the Political Insiders Advertising Network. What can I say? I write for a very niche audience when I have the time and inspiration. That’s no way to build an audience, and consequently no way to build an advertising base.

I wonder if this slowdown and possible leveling-off of blogging as a business could bring back some of the amateurism of the blogosphere — a tradition Blog P.I. upholds proudly, if occasionally, at least until someone is willing to pay me to do this (though I am grateful to NMS for hosting this site). Until that time, I’d like to see an ascendance of long-form blogging from experts. More analysis, less attitude. More Ed Feltens and fewer Duncan Blacks.

This is an especially good time for it, as back-and-forth discussions and quick-hit commentary is already moving to Twitter. Of course we’ll need someone to pick out the best stuff, like Memeorandum but with an eye for quality. Just as Silicon Alley Insider suggested yesterday, a curator’s approach to content could be where editing as a profession is going.

Of course, for that you need money too, and money will be scarce over the coming year, which is why I think we will see less blogging for dollars and more blogging for ideas. It will be painful for many, and already has if you consider Gawker’s contraction. But it might be a worthwhile thinning of the herd. And there will be plenty of time to blog for dollars when the Dow is back over 10,000.

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

What had Yglesias written to deserve this treatment? Two days prior, this:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

It shouldn’t take long to figure out what the reaction would be. And it took only three minutes for the first comment, by “The CAP Cleaning Staff”, to appear:

Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy.

Around the blogosphere, reactions have been much the same. Lefty bloggers from the netroots and academia, such as Matt Stoller and Brad DeLong, rallied to his side. Markos Moulitsas, who has a few more institutional relationships than most, was somewhat muted in his response, the first line simply being:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And I concur. The post was, as Yglesias friend Julian Sanchez put it, profoundly tone deaf. It makes CAP look less like a think tank and more like a message machine (something that is true of most DC research institutions, but few let their guard slip so badly) and it will bring yet more scrutiny to Third Way [Update: About which, great comparison here].

Yet this is also exactly the way of things, as James Joyner matter-of-factly explans:

CAP employs Matt to write a blog for them and, contrary to the views of some commenters, it’s absurd to expect that they should simply let him post whatever he feels like posting. Institutions start blogs with the purpose of advancing their institutional agenda. Writing for CAP is different from writing for a general interest magazine or on one’s own space, both of which Matt did previously.

What’s more, left-leaning but independent-minded Brendan Nyhan had already imagined just this scenario, and does not believe this will be an isolated incident:

There’s no way that this sort of reaction won’t create a chilling effect on Yglesias. How could he not think twice about criticizing Third Way or other CAP partners in the future? It’s the reason we need smart bloggers like him at independent outlets like The Atlantic that won’t enforce a party line.

It’s already having an effect on his comment section. To be sure, Yglesias’ commenters have been irritatingly wry and weirdly intelligent for years, but in response to this throwaway joke post this morning…

Deep Thought

The fact that the weather has swung rapidly from unseasonably warm to incredibly cold conclusively debunks concerns about man-made climate change.

…this was the first comment:

Now we know Jennifer Palmieri’s views on the weather. Also Third Way’s official opinions.

Just remember, Matt Yglesias is no longer writing on this blog. It’s been hijacked by Palmieri, CEO of Center for American Progress. Sad, that.

This is really sad.

I don’t think I’d go that far. But it is a reminder that the blogosphere is still subject to constraints from the outside world.

But what about the cultural debate? I noted in a recent post over at The Next Right that the left has largely acquiesced to gun rights. They may do so grudgingly, but for all intents and purposes they’ve given up. Except… that’s not what I found on some of the most influential leftroots blogs.

Instead, I found significant agreement with the ruling. Not just that, but matter-of-fact statements of support for an individual right that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

At Crooks and Liars, the first commenter just asked:

Is this good or bad?

The question alone is kind of surprising. And the answers came quickly:

This, my friend, is good. This is an area where we lefties have dropped the ball in a most spectacular fashion. Gun bans such as the DC only affect those actually willing to obey the law. That’s not a tagline, that’s a fact. We need to crack down on the illegal gun trade, NOT on law abiding citizens.

And some I didn’t expect at all:

Wow. John Paul Stevens could not be more off base.

Here’s another:

yay for pro second amendment democrats

And I didn’t have to look hard. These are all in the first 9 comments. Still, these are comments. How about a genuine top tier blogger? Here’s Kevin Drum:

I’m basically OK with this. My personal, layman’s view has always been that both the history and the wording of the Second Amendment point toward a limited, personal right to bear arms, not merely the right for a militia to be armed. On a practical level I’m less sure whether this is a good thing, since I’ve never gotten into the policy weeds of handgun control and whether it’s effective. Still: a right’s a right. The wording of the Second Amendment suggests to me that the government can regulate guns a bit more than they can regulate, say, speech, but that they can’t flatly ban them.

This is not to say that support was universal, but even the dissenters realized that gun control is all but dead. And at Daily Kos, Adam Bonin had advice for those inclined to be upset:

I encourage you to read this fully before rendering your opinions, because, well, it’s a Constitution we’re expounding here, and this comes up in other contexts as well. Sometimes in life (and in law), there are things that we might desire from a policy standpoint — like certain forms of gun control, or restrictions on some election-related speech — which are nevertheless forbidden by the Constitution.

And in the comments, some indeed were. For instance, here is the first comment:

Tragic day for America

DC has a tremendously bad gun problem and they can’t take these extremely resonable step of banning the gun most frequently used in crimes? It’s outrageous and despicable.

This comment was rated up 16 times. But what’s really great about this is the reply:

Disagree

The D.C. law was sweeping in banning the possession of handguns, period. If it were less sweeping, say, you can’t conceal the weapon, or you have to have a background check, or you have to wait several weeks or months to receive your gun, blah blah blah, I do not believe that would have been struck down. But the right to own a gun, stop, should not be infringed upon.

How did this one fare among the Kossacks? This one was rated up 57 times.

As Drum hints, there will be state-level debates about concealed carry, gun shows and specific makes, ammunition, etc. But now that a) Heller v. District has affirmed the individual right to own a firearm and b) influential liberal commentators and communities agree, the cultural battle over gun rights is effectively over.

P.S. For what it’s worth, Lawyers, Guns and Money is essentially neutral.

So it wasn’t “buried” per se, in that the story has not (as of about 8:00 p.m. Thursday) been demoted from the front page, and almost surely will not be. Last I checked, it was #10 out of 10 in all categories. The article submitted was a user diary by someone calling themselves environmentalist (like e.e. cummings or k.d. lang), cross-posted from the long-running mid-tier leftroots blog Unbossed.

The first Digg commenter said:

It’s a scam engineered by big oil interests to dupe the $4 per gallon weary public. Drilling/plundering our coasts for about 19 billion barrels of oil is akin to placing a Band-Aid on the hemorrhaging wound that is our oil-dependent, wasteful lifestyle.

The comment received +31 “diggs”, that is to say a net total of 31 votes in agreement. So far so good. But out of the ~430 comments added to this story, the top-rated comments fell somewhere between ~+150 and ~+50 diggs. Here is the first sentence of each, in descending order.

+151 diggs:

I hate to play devil’s advocate but here I go. (personal note: I am not a Republican)

+107:

Buried for being misleading bullshit.

+68:

If we began drilling offshore, oil prices would actually fall, because speculators trading in oil futures would bet on prices to be lower in the future.

+66:

Both candidates are forwarding two different ideas, but they are by no means mutually exclusive.

+59:

I should have guessed this was daily Kos bullshit.

+51:

Thanks, DailyKos, for continuing to put forth the stupidest ideas on the internet.

Anyone who follows the two websites knows that Digg and Daily Kos are both very pro-Obama. But apparently they are not pro-Obama in quite the same way. Better yet, Ron Paul’s volunteer army of paranoids seems to wandered off somewhere else.

As for the title and the caveat above, well, that’s not the only way Digg can bury Daily Kos:

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

• In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
• Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

• In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
• Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

• At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
• Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

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.

But even before Moulitsas’ column debuted, I think another blogger nailed the risks inherent in Markos’ accepting the assignment in the first place. That blogger was Kenton Kelly, mild-mannered Ohio accountant turned wild-mannered critic of Pajamas Media, better known as Dennis the Peasant. From his post on November 19:

I have difficulty believing Markos can pull off the very difficult task of reconciling the requirements of expressing himself as a movement partisan to two very different audiences: Netroots members and undecided voters. Each is going to have differing expectations as to what they will get out of those columns. Netroots are, I’ll wager, looking for what they’ve come to expect out of Markos; fire-breathing, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners advocacy of progressive policy positions. Understand that what I am not suggesting here is that his Netroots audience expects him to drop f-bombs and excoriate progressivism’s enemies by name as he does at DailyKOS. What they will be expecting, however, is that Markos not give an inch on issues because of any sort of tactical considerations. Expressing open contempt for triangulation and compromise on the issues is, after all, a large part of Markos’ modus operandi.

Walking that fine line between staying uncompromisingly true to Netroots’ core ideals and supporting whomever the Democrats nominate is going to be a difficult task. Unless the Republican candidate flames out immediately after receiving his party’s nomination, it is a certainty that at some point in the race the Democratic candidate is going to have to tack from left to center to gather enough votes to win. This is the precise point in time when things are going to get dangerous for a movement partisan. That’s because Markos has been quite explicit in his distain of the centrist strategies of the Democratic “establishment”. The much reviled Bob Shrum would be just the sort to swallow such a centrist shift as a matter of practical political necessity. How can Markos approve of such a shift when it comes (and it will) without drawing the ire of his supporters?

If Markos chooses to explicitly reject a centrist shift by the Democratic candidate in his Newsweek columns, how does he do so without alienating undecided (i.e., centrist) voters? At some point the decision is going to have to be made by members of the Netroots movement, and by Markos, as to whether there will ever be a time where ideological purity can coexist with the practical needs of daily politics. By this I simply mean that at some point – and I would argue that point is very close at hand – the Netroots movement will have recruited all they can recruit, and converted all they can convert, using the message and tactics they now employ. When the moment arrives where a decision between continued purity and continued growth, what will be Netroots’ response?

Now, I don’t really think Markos matters that much to undecided or moderate voters. Of the factors that will determine their ‘08 vote, Moulitsas’ pronouncements will be very far down the list, even as he’ll be in the relatively high-profile pages of Newsweek. But it will certainly be fascinating to see how individual lefty bloggers and their adherents, including the Kossacks, will react when the nominee inevitably stakes out positions problematic (even anathema) to the activist base. Brooking no compromise is a key identifying feature of the capital-N netroots; some will go along and others will protest. And Moulitsas, with his new perch, will bear the brunt of this scrutiny.

We’ve already seen a bit of this as Matt Stoller, Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have put pressure on the so-called “Bush Dog Democrats” (i.e. Blue Dogs) — especially on Iraq — while other prominent bloggers have largely avoided the specific accusation. A year from now, this cleavage will be much more apparent.

The whole Dennis — er, Kelly — post is worth reading, and I won’t quote the whole thing here (à la the late Steve Gilliard) and so deprive him of what meager traffic Blog P.I. directs (we’re nothing if not not Glenn Reynolds), but I must address his penultimate paragraph. As he wrote,

the events of the last two years have brought into question widely held assumptions about how much political influence Netroots and Markos Moulitsas actually wield. His attempt to unseat Joe Lieberman ended in spectacular failure, with Lieberman waxing Ned Lamont by 10 percentage points in a three man race. And for all the proclamations of victory after the congressional elections of 2006, what has become very clear is that many of the newest congressional Democrats have absolutely no interest in backing a Netroots agenda. It is not hard to come to the conclusion, after watching Speakers Pelosi and Reid suffering repeated defeats trying to push an explicitly progressive agenda, that perhaps assumptions of Netroots’ influence have been, shall we say, unduly optimistic. This impression was reinforced when most of the Democratic presidential candidates chose to skip 2007’s YearlyKOS convention. [Note: He's wrong about this, especially as the candidates avoided the DLC meeting entirely, but it doesn't negate his overall point.] You could certainly draw the additional conclusion, after listening to the exasperation voiced by congressional Democrats from David Obey to Steny Hoyer, that many Democrats view Netroots as much an impediment as an ally in advancing Democratic policies. How a column in Newsweek helps Markos in convincing the political class of the Democratic Party that he can deliver the goods (and is worth the trouble he causes) is beyond me.

Although Markos is no longer slagged by conservatives as going electorally “oh-fer” (despite Lamont’s loss to Lieberman, Kos et al. did back a slate of winners in ‘06) it’s very much an open question as to whether netroots issues are succeeding among Democrats. It’s not so much an open question as to whether elected Democrats are implementing their policy vision (such as it is), hence the anti-”Bush Dog” activism.

Another outstanding question is how Moulitsas and his fellow “progressives” will keep the coalition together past — and even into — the 2008 race, regardless of the policies adopted by the eventual nominee (i.e. Clinton, who never had them, or Obama, who has not always impressed them but has seen a surge (so to speak) among Kossacks recently).

As someone who reads Daily Kos much more often than non-leftroots bloggers, I can attest that a not-insignificant number comprise those who are not necessarily traditional liberals, let alone leftists, but have joined the community based on their opposition to Bush and the Iraq war. The effort in/occupation of Iraq will obviously continue beyond Bush’s presidency, but even the war has receded as an issue — at least in the general population if not on Moulitsas’ website. No wonder, as Dennis/Kelly pointed out afterward, Moulitsas insisted in his first Newsweek column that the imperative for Democrats in 2008 is to make Bush the issue.

Without Bush to kick around anymore, Markos will have a much harder time keeping his constituency together.

On Thursday I gave a somewhat-impulsive thumbs-up to RedState’s call for CNN to sack their political director. National Review’s indispensible Jim Geraghty has outlined eight editorial oversights (four quite serious, four merely problematic) in CNN’s vetting of the televised questioners. One or two would be enough to generate a blogswarm, but eight looks like malicious negligence, and it subseqently became a full-fledged blogstorm. Worse, CNN’s statement didn’t even attempt to be a “non-apology apology” — they’re digging in their heels and claiming:

The issues raised during last night’s debate were legitimate and relevant no matter who was asking the questions. The vested interests who are challenging the credibility of the questioners are trying to distract voters from the substantive issues they care most about.

Did somebody say “fake but accurate”? As QandO’s McQ notes, the hubris implicit in that statement is galling:

Says who? Says CNN, that’s who. It is the network that chose the questions that would be aired. Consequently what aired had nothing to do with what voters found to be the substantive issues of the day, but instead had everything to do with — say it with me — what CNN decided were the substantive issues of the day.

I stand by my initial judgement — in fact, I am all the more sure of it — but I realize it isn’t going to happen. (FWIW, CNN’s political director is Sam Feist; one wonders if indie rock/iPod Nano darling Feist could do any worse). And the truth is it wouldn’t make up for the debacle, so I concede that a change is not imperative. What would be better is a pro-active solution — that is, another debate. And so I am very intrigued by a new proposal, this time issued jointly by RedState and Human Events (both subsidiaries of Eagle Pubishing), for a “do-over debate”:

We have a base of readers who represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party. You — and the Republican Party — deserve to face the questions posed by undecided Republicans, not Democratic activists. We will solicit and obtain YouTube videos from those people and vet each questioner to establish that they are — really — undecided Republicans. We hope to include soldiers in the field in Iraq, Young Republicans, and others who still have not decided among you.

Today, allow us to make you this offer: We will organize a debate at a time and date amenable to you all. We will work with a national broadcaster to broadcast the debate as well as offer it online. We, not the liberal drive by media, will ensure the questioners are who they say they are. And we will choose them based on criteria that will be fully disclosed to you all which ensure the questioners aren’t activists for any Democratic candidate.

I think this is a terrific idea. The MSM no longer has a monopoly on campaign coverage, so why should they have a monopoly over organizing candidate debates? The only good answer is because they control the airwaves. Could Fox News be persuaded to air it? Possibly. C-SPAN would certainly set up a camera, it could be simulcast on the web, and it would obviously be made available on YouTube. Heck, put it on the History Channel. I bet more people would watch it.

And if so desired, Google/YouTube (GooTube, if you will) need not formally be involved. Eagle’s online outlets could independently create a YouTube account, put RedState’s Erick Erickson and Human Events’ Jed Babbin in a short video soliciting questions, and anyone could post their videos as responses. Eagle could narrow them down, submit them to a hand-picked group of conservative bloggers to identify the best, and blog readers would be invited to vet the questions themselves. The ultimate decisions should still be made by the organizing consortium, but the crowdsourcing would be a substantial (if not bulletproof) way to head off complaints from conservatives. Necessarily, this would aso give the campaigns time to study the questions and prepare well-thought out answers — this too would be different from the “gotcha” element that annoyed so many in the CNN/YouTube debate.

Of course, the last point hints at the major reason why it wouldn’t happen. Here I’ll note: I cannot formally join the call for such a debate; as I point out whenever relevant, New Media Strategies consults for the Fred Thompson campaign, and I won’t put the campaign or my employer on the spot. Same goes for the other campaigns, though — the Iowa caucuses are now a month away and no campaign should be pressured to join a debate in a time frame this limited. The CNN/YouTube debate required months, not to mention a “Save the Debate” movement by Republican bloggers, to happen at all. So don’t hold your breath, and save your Facebook campaigns. But it’s a terrific idea.

To address another issue: A few commenters on the above-mentioned post here, including some friends of Blog P.I., apparently read my criticism of the debate as a complaint about tough questions. If I understand them correctly, they feared a not-yet-proposed alternative would result in “softball” questions. I replied that they were mistaken, and pointed to a prediction by Patterico following the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate in July:

The Democrat debate was dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?” And the Republican debate will be dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?”

That pretty much nailed it. The problem is not that the issues CNN is so pleased with itself for raising were illegitimate or unfair. They were not. It’s that those Dem-leaning questions asked by Dem-leaning YouTubers were general election questions, and the general election audience generally (as it were) was not watching. Certainly Republicans should keep an eye toward next November, but a debate for a Republican primary should focus on issues that matter to Republicans. Say what you will, but “don’t ask, don’t tell” just isn’t one of them, and it doesn’t help Republican voters make up their minds. It does no good when Google flies a publicly-identifiable Hillary Clinton supporter in to berate the candidates about their position on the issue. (One which, I would like to point out, is unlikely to be a major factor in the general, either.) In fact, it rises to the level of farce when Anderson Cooper asks said Hillary supporter to rule on whether or not the candidates answered his question and the guy says “no,” yet anyone who was paying attention knows they did answer his question honestly, but he just didn’t like their answers.

True, CNN did air questions about illegal immigration, gun rights and religion. But RedState/Human Events would query those subjects, too. They might even include a question about the Bible that doesn’t conform to slack-jawed yokel stereotypes (sorry, Joseph Dearing, whomever you are, but when you assert that your question tells us “everything we need to know” about the GOP hopefuls, that’s how you come across). Although various writers at RedState and Human Events have evinced support for various candidates (Erickson most notably in favor of Fred Thompson, I can’t help but note), I would argue they have a greater interest than CNN in a strong, fair debate that includes difficult questions for all the candidates, because (as Erickson and Babbin point out) it’s their audience who will be deciding which Republican goes on to the general election.

In short, RedState and Human Events would be better curators of a Republican debate than CNN.

Because I am confident that this do-over debate will not come to pass, I encourage both to organize similar debates for Senate and House candidates, whose primaries mostly will not be decided until further into next year. This would give them time to work out the kinks, gain experience appealing to local television channels for airtime, and give them credibility in proposing such a debate in 2012 (er, 2011, but you know what I mean). I call on Pajamas Media, NRO, Heritage or any other independent, webbish, GOP-leaning organization to do the same. Now that I think about it, I call on Josh Marshall’s TPM empire to do the same for Democrats.

You know what would be awesome next fall, sometime after the conventions and before the general election, Commission on Presidential Debates-permitting? A RedState/Daily Kos YouTube debate.