Blog P.I.

Matt Stoller, my #1 fan, has more complimentary things to say about me and my former employer this week, at MyDD’s Breaking Blue mini-blog. His post, in its entirety:

Get Rid of the Blogometer

I have to confess that I love the Hotline. It’s really a well-done newsletter on politics, much more driven by reality than the Note and much less courtier-obsessed than most tip sheets. I just wish they’d get rid of the Blogometer, which they just can’t get right. First it was William Beutler, who couldn’t cover the left without engaging in partisan hatcheteering. There’s this, for instance.

8/16 is yet another example of the trend as a broad coalition of conservative bloggers and other established institutions join forces to promote an anti-pork spending project that, since the GOP’s in power, ought to bring embarrassment to GOP lawmakers in the midst of a tough cycle. With their current belief in partisanship at all costs (see CT SEN), would lefty bloggers ever put forward such an effort that had the potential to hurt so many Dems?

Liberal bloggers just defeated a Democrat in a Democratic primary, yet somehow that proves that we’re afraid to hurt members of our own party. Ok then. There’s a larger problem here, which is that you cannot just segment off blogs into their own little box. Or rather, you can on the right, since right-wing blogs are basically irrelevant. But on the left, there is no blogosphere that can be separated from the progressive movement at large, so segmenting them from the localities and issue areas they cover makes less and less sense, and makes Conn Carroll’s job increasingly difficult.

Let’s take this in order:

In spite of his (well-founded) respect for The Hotline, Stoller thinks the Blogometer section should be cut because it has displeased him, so far as we are aware, exactly twice: Once, an op-ed that I wrote for another publication (which I defended at MyDD), and again now that Carroll has asked a question that he disagrees with (and he doesn’t even comprehend that it was a question, not a statement).

As an activist, Stoller appears to project his own “hatcheteering” ways onto others, especially political journalists. Oh well. He’s made up his mind on this for sure, but if he thinks I’m an unblinking partisan hatcheteer, then he really isn’t reading very closely. Then again, Matt isn’t exactly known for his sense of proportion. And you can tell he hasn’t been reading very carefully in part beause his imprecise writing style implies that the “for instance” relates to me, when in fact he’s linking to Conn’s Wednesday column.

More evidence: Conn’s question is about whether the progressive netroots would go after “many” Democrats, not just Joe Lieberman, as the fiscally conservative Porkbusters takes aim at a majority of Republicans. Wasn’t the lefty argument that Lieberman was a special case, not a good Democrat, basically a Republican in disguise? Besides, if Stoller thinks the anti-Lieberman campaign might “hurt so many Dems” then it sounds as if he accepts Jacob Weisberg’s proposition that the nomination of Ned Lamont is perilous for the Democratic party. That can’t be what he means, but that’s what it sounds like.

Most confusing of all is Matt’s assertion that conservative blogs are “irrelevant” and can be put in their “own little box,” whereas liberal blogs are influential because they cannot be “separated from the progressive movement at large.” This analysis comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that his co-blogger, Chris Bowers, argued (rather preposterously) in March that the right-blogosphere had been “annihilated” because they “have now been incorporated into the established news media apparatus.” This was overly reductive and arrived at dubious conclusions, but it’s also the opposite of Stoller’s diagnosis. Are conservative blogs “irrelevant” because they work in tandem with the right-wing “message machine” or is the left-blogosphere powerful because they’re indistinguishable from the “progressive movement at large”? It can’t be both. If Stoller and Bowers disagree on this point, I’d like to hear why.

Not to mention, Stoller’s final link, to a National Journal Insider’s Poll, doesn’t say what he thinks it does. Instead of proving that the rightosphere is inconsequential, it merely shows that Democrats think the “netroots” will help them in the fall, while Republicans doubt that they’ll have much of an impact. The question didn’t even draw a distinction between the two halves of the blogosphere.

And I’m not the first to notice MyDD’s self-serving tendencies: As journalist David Kline, author of the book “BlogRevolt,” said of Stoller and Bowers’ New Politics Institute-backed study of the progressive blogosphere last year:

[The study's] well-intentioned yet infuriatingly self-satisfied “analysis” of the supposed differences between the conservative versus progressive blogosphere reveals (once again) how the still waters of myopia and denial continue to run very deep indeed within Democratic circles.

There are several reasons why I don’t take Stoller and Bowers all that seriously, but their lackluster prose and inconsistent analyses are reasons enough.

P.S. All right, here’s two more, from Bowers:

• Yesterday he told fellow bloggers to approach the new book by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed thusly:

  Don’t read this book. Stay as far away from it as you can.

  Is that good advice? If the book is as potentially damaging to the netroots as Bowers says it is, shouldn’t they all read it so they know what they’re fighting against? Advocacy of ignorance doesn’t strike me as particularly wise.
• The previous day, he responded to the new Q-poll showing Lieberman with a small double-digit lead over Lamont with the following headline:

  Lamont Cuts Lieberman’s Lead In Half

  That’s some spin, all right. What he doesn’t mention is that the July poll he’s comparing the new one against measured “likely Democratic primary voters” and the new one measures all “likely voters”. Somebody get this man a PR job.

P.P.S. If you don’t catch the headline’s reference, see Stoller’s first link.