Whether or not Kossack heads actually exploded throughout the leftosphere this weekend, I cannot say. Reports will trickle in… or not. But Newsweek’s experiment of pairing the Great and Powerful Kos with the Great and Powerful Rove is off and running, and it’s not too soon to draw some preliminary conclusions. First, in terms of drawing blog hype, Newsweek could hardly done a better job of securing two more polarizing and potentially intriguing figures — for the left and right each, I’m having a hard time coming up with any two people in politics who inspire as much passion in their detractors outside of current and former presidents.
I’ll leave the reviews to others, but 24 hours after both stories hit the web, how are they doing in terms of measurable attention? Newsweek provides two metrics that we must assume are the most accurate, simply because they are based on internal numbers, even though Newsweek does not provide actual numbers. I understand why they don’t release them, but if the Digg-ification of the Internet continues apace, they will eventually. So which of the two was e-mailed more than the other?
As we see, this was a clear win for Rove. As of about 10 p.m. on Monday night, Rove’s piece has been e-mailed more often — but we still don’t know by how much. Second, Newsweek’s list of the top 10 most viewed stories:
Even without precise figures, this one paints a clearer picture: Rove is at number one, and Kos is nowhere to be found. Short of a Chris Bowers Google bomb, Rove is the greatest and most powerful.
How can this be? Kos is arguably at the zenith of his fame, with appearances on The Colbert Report and Meet the Press earlier in the year, still reigning as one of the RNC’s favorite bogeymen. Rove on the other hand is out of the White House and for all anyone knows, out of national politics. It may say something about Time readers just not knowing who Kos is, but I’m operating under the assumption that the online version of Newsweek reaches what IPDI has termed the “Poli-fluentials.” To be sure, time will tell. One possibility is that Kos, with his eminently Internet-based platform, stands to do better over the long run. But I also ran the Newsweek column’s permalinks through Technorati to find out how many times each had been linked by another blog. It wasn’t close. At all:
Ouch. Then again, if you look at the top blogs linking to both articles (results above are sorted by authority) a clear majority hail from the left. Maybe the left still remains more interested in Rove than the right is in Kos.
Another possibilty is more subjective, but I’ll offer it anyway: Maybe Kos just isn’t that interesting a writer. Like more than a few in my line of work, I’ve been perusing Matt Bai’s “The Argument” lately, and Bai does little to conceal his skepticism of Moulitsas’ political knowledge. Now, I have read both articles, and I did find Rove’s much more interesting. But don’t take my word for it — the blogosphere seems to agree. I have also seen both speak in a public setting, and perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, but the seasoned campaign veteran was certainly more compelling than his younger upstart opponent. And there was the time when Kos got a tryout with ideo-journalistic Washington, but didn’t quite make the cut.
An aside: Last week I went with my colleagues and associates Jon Henke, Leslie Bradshaw and Jesse Thomas to see Rove co-keynote Yahoo’s Citizen 2.0 midday bash with Max Cleland (!) at the Willard Intercontinental. They’ve already written about it in detail, but I can’t help noting that their study merely put a slightly different gloss on the IPDI report linked above, i.e. “Citizen 2.0″ has replaced “Poli-fluential.”
Just about Rove, however, I must say: His arguments and observations were as well-honed as any “Internet expert” I’ve seen address a political crowd. And Rove knew what he was talking about: He recalled early computer hard drives he owned, admitted to his membership in the Apple cult, delivered a paean to Moore’s Law, and mused about the long-term effects of TiVo and time-shifting. He spoke of the Allen/Webb race (though he didn’t use the word “Macaca”) and cited studies of the blogosphere like any contributor to TechPresident. That’s why I was a little surprised and disappointed to see Michael Bassik dismiss him as “Not Citzen 2.0″ when in fact the definition given by Yahoo! makes Rove almost the perfect example. I was less surprised to see Think Progress willfully misinterpret the goings-on, but Henke has that one covered. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but don’t say he’s not a geek.
On the other hand, he did mispronounce “Kos.”
P.S. This is as good a time as any to share this photo, taken with my iPhone, of Karl Rove taking a picture of me with his iPhone:
The man on the right is former Senator Cleland. Believe it or not, they got along like old chums. My guess, and it’s just a hunch, is that Cleland is better at hiding his thoughts and feelings than his boisterous persona suggests. The man on the left appears to be from an Aphex Twin video.
P.P.S. What if Rove turned to blogging? Tom DeLay’s occasionally updated blog is in relaunch limbo at the moment, which provides not the best precedent (despite my own pleasantly surprised initial reaction) but then DeLay was never known as a thinker, either, and left official Washington under considerably less triumphant circumstances. So I think Rove could do well, and I bet he would even write it. If he consented to participate in rightosphere activities like appearing on Heading Right Radio (warning: automatic audio), he could quickly become one of the most influential voices on the Internet. But even then, I’m not sure he’d be the most influential voice on the right.
P.P.P.S. Then again, we haven’t even begun to address the matter of which fledgling columnist Google thinks is the greater and more powerful.
The Blogosphere is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Call me crazy, but the blog launched today under Tom DeLay’s name — he said tonight on Hardball that he’s not actually writing it (”I’m not a very good writer”) — is not half-bad. I’m not saying that it’s great, or that it will even be accepted by the rightosphere at large (DeLay has many detractors on the right), but that whomever set it up clearly knows what they’re doing.
But then, one could argue that Tom DeLay is no longer a politician, just another conservative activist, so perhaps he’ll be willing to take on opponents in a manner sitting officials never are. To wit, the latest post at the time of this writing bashes Jimmy Carter for his “apartheid” book, and another post applauds Michelle Malkin for slamming Kofi Annan — just like a regular old conservative blogger.
His blogroll rings true, including just about every standard big-name blog of the rightosphere save Instapundit, and even includes Mickey Kaus (incorrectly listed as “Kaus Files”), the favorite liberal of many a conservative blogger.
Blogger “carnivals” — edited round-ups of self-submitted entries — are a mainstay of the blogosphere, and DeLay is promising a “Carnival of Conservatives” every other Friday. We’ll see exactly what that means, but it certainly sounds like a commitment to being an active participant in the political blogosphere.
What’s more, the content management system appears to be either WordPress or Movable Type, and even if not, it sure looks like a site powered by one of those traditional blogging platforms. It even claims to be protected under Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons license — which is somewhat amusing; DeLay does not strike me as a typical adherent of copyleft provisions.
Best of all, liberals are allowed to comment, at least so far. Holden of First Draft, the the owner of many ponies, has the third comment in this thread. Comments by new users are moderated, and Holden was critical but polite. One assumes that profanity is a red flag [Update: Yep] — an issue liberal and conservative bloggers do not see eye-to-eye on — but if DeLay’s team continues to let dissonant views through, the site will be the better for it.
What’s more, Holden is listed as unregistered, and as yet one need not even provide an e-mail address before commenting — something many traditional blogs do not allow.
Not that the site is entirely praiseworthy. It’s not such a big issue that he’s not actually writing his posts — few politicians do — but this disclosure does not appear on the site, though some posts do go up under his name. Even a shared byline would be nice, to give some idea of who is responsible for word choice.
For example, one contributor goes by the moniker NJ Conservative. No indication whether that person is the same as this NJ Conservative. Another is billed as NH Conservative, so the odds are these are merely anonymous contributors named for their state of residence. Will nobody post under their own names?
Meanwhile, if you want to sign up for his new political action committee, GAIN (Grassroots, Action, and Information Network), you’ll have to download a MS Word DOC, provide references, pay $52 “at the time of acceptance” and e-mail it back or upload it to the site. That’s not as bad mailing it back, but it is cumbersome. And if you’re posting this to the Internet in the first place, why require references?
Additionally, Jackie Kucinich of The Hill (and yes, daughter of you-know-who) reports that GAIN is supposed to be like a conservative MoveOn.org. I’m not sure if the analogy is hers alone — the organization’s about page doesn’t make that comparison, not that you’d expect it to — but I do know that MoveOn.org doesn’t require a membership fee upfront.
These parallel institutions, activist group and community blog, currently operate under two separate ethoses, and chances are one will eventually prevail. Time will tell which one supersedes the other. DeLay being a hardened Washington power player, I’ll predict that the blog’s best days are right this moment — one vitriolic blogswarm and the comment section could become as closed as DeLay’s former political operation.
But he is also the consummate politician, willing to go on Hardball on the day he resigned, and if he can keep smiling through the blog fights that surely lay ahead, he just may have something here.
Update: Ahem. Well, it seems that the original first post has been deleted from the website, or at the very least altered. A scandal? John Amato at Crooks and Liars seems to lean in that direction. The original DeLay post was saved and has been reposted here, with the first 111 comments available here.
It doesn’t appear that DeLay wrote anything compromising in the first post, but when you read those comments, you can see why it might have come down. Warning — “language” follows:
And:
Plus:
Also:
An unregistered user claiming to be DeLay writes:
A lone voice protests:
Okay. Again, call me crazy, but it sounds like the problem here was that they didn’t have their comment moderation system ready to go at launch. That’s a blunder, to be sure, but this is not a case of DeLay’s team removing an embarrassing or erroneous post of their own (although I am confused as to why the original text of that post was removed). Lefty bloggers say civility is overrated, and while there are circumstances where they have a point, this is not one of them.
Amato implies that Democratic voices are censored from the site, but as I’ve demonstrated above, that isn’t true. But it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.