Bloggers on the Bus, bloggers in the index

Got my copy of Eric Boehlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press the other day and first thing I did, naturally, was open it to the index and do a mental CNTL-F for friends, acquaintances, rivals, secret crushes, and myself.

I'm not in it.

Didn't expect I would be.  Why would I be?  Eric's premise---and I feel comfortable calling him Eric because we're like that.  We follow each other on Twitter.---is that the rise of the progressive blogosphere---the netoots---profoundly influenced both the last two national elections and the way the national media covered them, and I'm not part of the netroots.  Not in any active way.  I don't use the blog to organize or raise funds or get out the vote.  I don't mind making it clear who's got my vote but I've never done it in the form of an endorsement, because who cares?  My rants against Republicans, conservatives, quisling Democrats, and the journalists who love them are just me blowing off steam.  I'm not leading or trying to lead in the attack.  I don't have an issue or a theme.  As much as I write about  politics, I don't consider myself a political blogger at all or even a liberal one.  I write about what's on my mind at the moment and that works against my influencing the debate---when other bloggers are tackling the big issues with fire and passion, if you click over here you're likely to find a review of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

And I'm not sure that very many people with political clout even know I exist.  Peter Daou has been a fan of the blog from way back and he's been very generous in arranging invitations to events that have brought me into contact with some seriously important people---I ever tell you about the time I made Hillary laugh?---and Austin Guest has kindly done a decent job of keeping me up to date on what's being done by the Progressive States Network.  But when I attend their shindigs and to-dos I have a tendency to drift into a shadowy corner and gawk from there.  It's not that I'm shy.  It's just more fun to eavesdrop and spy than to schmooze.  I'm there because I'm interested in them.  Schmoozing is about making them interested in you, and that's work.

I did shake Ned Lamont's hand once though.

My sense, anyway, is that thanks to Jim Wolcott most of my readership lives and breathes outside the political world and that, for some reason, my readers include more scientists than politicians and journalists, and I'm proud of that.

But even if I was plugged in, and involved, and important, there's another good reason for Eric to have left me out of his book, despite the fact that we're like that---Did I mention we follow each other on Twitter?---Bloggers on the Bus isn't just about the rise and triumph of the netroots, Eric also tells the story of how the Progressive blogosphere almost tore itself apart during the Democratic primaries last year, and I stayed well out of that narrative.

Regular readers might remember that was rooting for Clinton in the primaries, but perceptive readers noticed that I really didn't care who won the nomination, Clinton or Obama.  I didn't see they were all that different on the issues, I liked and respected the both of them, and I was pretty confident that either one would beat John McCain.  Hillary would have done it differently, that's all.

I also thought and still think the prolonged primary campaign was good for the Party and ultimately good for Obama.  That opinion, more specifically the irritation it seemed to cause my Obama-supporting readers and fellow bloggers, was the first clue I had that something odd and unpleasant was going  on.  But I sort of shrugged it off philosophically, figuring that once one or the other had the nomination in hand, the other's supporters would climb aboard the bandwagon.  After all, it wasn't about us.

I guess I was sort of aware that bloggers on both sides were not distinguishing themselves, because I stopped reading a bunch of blogs I'd been in the habit of visiting regularly, pro-Clinton and pro-Obama.  At any rate, I knew there was disagreement, but I didn't know the depth of bitterness and anger and resentment it caused.  I still baffles me when I come across residual signs of that bitterness, anger, and resentment, when I read a post by a progressive blogger who seems to want an apology that Barack Obama has turned out to be what he always appeared to be or a one time Hillary-backer who seems to think Obama-supporters should be ashamed of the fact that President Obama is governing pretty much as President Clinton would have and even relying on the same set of advisers.

I'm not telling you this to impress you with my Olympian detachment and my ability to coolly rise above the fray---basically I'm admitting to be way out of the loop.  Something weird happened and I missed it.

So I'm telling you this to let you know that a great chunk of the story Eric's telling in Bloggers on the Bus is new to me.  Despite all the years I've put into this blogging biz, I'm learning things from the book.  Frankly, a lot of what I'm learning isn't very heartening or inspiring.  The netroots isn't a gathering of saints and heroes, and I never thought it was.  But it's not fun finding out how unsaintly and unheroic some of us have been.  On the other hand, few of us rise (or sink) to the level of villains and monsters either.  Eric has unabashedly modeled his book on Timothy Crouse's great expose of the national press corps and the 1972 Presidential campaign, The Boys on the Bus , but the fact is that bloggers aren't great fodder for gossip, because basically what we do is stay home and read and type.  Not a lot of drama or comedy in that, and very little sex, and what sex there is is virtual and that doesn't make for many steamy sex scenes.  Maybe Eric should have waited until after the next election to write his book, when more of us have actually been on the bus and had the same opportunities to misbehave and make fools of ourselves the way the regular press corps does every four years.

On the other hand, it's good to see in print and in one place the story of how the Progressive blogosphere made itself what it is while its Conservative counterpart turned into Bizzaro World.

At any rate, the index lists the usual suspects.  You can guess who they are.  The Blue and Orange Satans figure prominently, of course.  But so do Howie Klein, Chris Bowers, and Jane Hamsher.  Digby gets her due, and, nothing against Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein, but I was pleased to find that Susie Madrak is in there and that she rates five pages to their single page apiece.

Four pages, 154-157, are devoted to another blogger I'm kind of fond of and those three pages contain my favorite passage in the book so far:

Hoosier feminists might be a rare breed, but McEwan became one.  Raised in the Indiana blue-collar town of Portage by her stay-at-home mom and history-teaching dad, McEwan from a very early age was the kid asking uncomfortable questions and announcing that the answers were wholly insufficient.  For instance, why could women at her Lutheran church teach Sunday school classes but not become ordained as ministers?  That didn't make sense to her.

She'd been interested in politics from a young age.  She remembered sitting in a circle in elementary school at the beginning of the year and kids taking turns telling what their dad did for a living.  The most frequent answer was "My dad is laid off."  McEwan asked her parents what that meant and they gave her an early primer in Reaganomics.  With insight into how government and the choices made by politicians can affect everyday people in Portage, McEwan got hooked.  "Growing up in Laid Offville was really got me interested," she told me.

Not bad.  But I think I still prefer reading Wev's own work to reading about her.

Here she is on empathy: 

Here, then, is the conservative view laid bare: Empathy and reason are mutually exclusive concepts. It is thus never reasonable to be empathetic.

And, truly, if one's worldview is structured principally of self-interest, empathy isn't reasonable, but is, in fact, a catastrophic risk to the privileged beneficiaries of an ideology built upon their informed lack of compassion and their rank-and-file's ignorant lack of compassion.

Empathy is what happens when racist white parents discover their child's best friend at school is black, and they begin to revisit their prejudices. Empathy is what happens when a homophobic woman finds out that male coworker she really likes is gay, and she begins to reconsider all those biases she's held for so long. Empathy is what happens when real life, real people, prove obviously, demonstrably wrong all those conservative bedtime stories about gays and immigrants and castrating feminazis that go bump in the night.

And here is on a conservative's demand that Sonia Sotomayor change the pronunciation of her name to make his life easier and how hard multiculturalism can be on conservative white men:

It makes them have to engage their precious brains for .03 milliseconds when pronouncing ethnic names of national figures—and soon all those .03 milliseconds will add up to one second, and that one second will add up to twelve seconds a year, and we can't be wasting precious white male brains for twelve seconds a year when they need to be focused on important things like discussing their favorite scene in Superbad.

We might not be saints and heroes, but some of us sure know how to turn a phrase.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

Lance, quoting his Sister Site, wrote, "And, truly, if one's worldview is structured principally of self-interest, empathy isn't reasonable".

It's worth noting that Adam Smith wrote extensively on empathy (except he called it "moral sympathy"). Although the self-interest types worship Smith, they probably wouldn't if they bothered to read his stuff more carefully.

[Ian Welsh]

Yup, there's a fair bit of residual bitterness. If I'm the guy you're referring to, yes, I'm pissed at a lot of netroots bloggers for repeatedly telling people that Obama was particularly liberal on the issues, when he wasn't. The economic policies Obama is following are about what I predicted. He's worse on civil liberties than even people like me expected, and so on.

Unlike the Clinton fans, I don't think Clinton was much better (though, having taken the time to actually read her policies I can say she was slightly to his left domestically, and to his right on foreign affairs). But what I told people was simple enough - that they were both centrists, and that people who wanted to elect progressive politicians should spend their time and money downticket.

Paul Krugman said the same thing, minus the "where to spend your money and time" thing.

The irony is that Obama didn't woo the netroots bloggers at all, with the exception of making sure he had at least one major blog as a channel for oppo dumps. Bloggers ripped themselves apart for (and in a few cases, against) him, and he didn't care. He had and has no respect for the netroots or blogs, and the netroots and blogs have very minimal influence in or with the Obama administration. (I'm not saying he should have respect, btw, from a cold hard power calculus there is a strong argument for disrespecting the netroots - they have nowhere to go, and will rally round anyway, so why bother?)

Does any of this matter? Not sure. The netroots can make a difference in certain targeted ways, and at certain times and places, but it cannot deliver enough votes or money to be a major player at the Presidential level, and the blogs media clout is in relative terms, diminished compared to the highpoint (around 05 to early 07).

[Linkmeister]

Ian, I'd argue that the netroots are far better suited for downticket elections, even to the municipal level. Bloggers who focus on those are far more likely to attract local readers and even candidates than big Presidential or Senatorial races. Every political blogger has an opinion on those races; it's the local ones where he or she could make a real difference.

Not that I have ever practiced that, mind you.

[Sunny Jim]

As very much a casual reader and not a blogger, my two cents: Reading blogs like Lance's on a daily basis for about five years now has made me tons more well-informed than I could ever be with only newspapers. I could present an arms-length list of stories from the Bush years that started out as blog-driven and gained momentum until the cable news shows COULDN'T ignore them and still call themselves credible news outlets. Plus, Lance's blog roll is second to none, giving me such wonderful discoveries as the Mahablog, which in turn has become a daily must-read. Plus, I would strongly disagree with the notion that blogger influence peaked in early '07. To the extent that you can call it a movement, starting with Howard Dean in '04 and continuing with all those $20 bills sent to Obama last year, I don't think we've yet seen the full effects on a national scale. Cheers.

[Bob Westal]

Lance -- you were for Hillary? Oh, the disillusionment!

But, seriously, even though I'm not even a political blogger at all and will never, ever make Mrs. Clinton or any other politician at the national level laugh, I was pretty active during the primary and I post at DailyKos, and I can say that, yeah, things were pretty nasty at times in Netrootsville. (My real life encounters with Hillary supporters, some of whom included my best friends, were considerably better -- though sometimes almost as frustrating!) And, while my respect for Hillary has grown exponentially in her role as Sec'y of State (not bombing Iran and, somewhat surprisingly putting a bit of pressure on Israel's far-right government will do that for me), I have to say that the hard feelings for a certain strain of her supporters remains.

I could probably write a 10,000 word essay on the matter but the short version is being called a mindless follower of the dear leader, while then being castigated for "my side" saying nasty things about Hillary supporters in precisely the same breath as being informed I was probably a misogynist, can make a guy a bit touchy. It still lingers and, every time Obama disappoints (as any sane observer knew he would at times -- though actually so far less often than I expected; most of us knew he wasn't some kind of progressive wet dream, that wasn't what it was about), the Eddie G. Robinson "where's your messiah now?" posts appear and it all comes back to me. No wonder Obama keeps it all at arm's length. The guy's absurdly smart. As, I suppose, so are you for staying out of that mishegas for the most part.

[Lance]

Bob, what can I say? Her performance at State doesn't surprise me.

Sunny Jim, thanks.

Ken Muldrew, your providing that quote shows why I'd rather have you scientists reading the blog than any beltway insiders.

Ian, I didn't have anyone particular in mind. Thinking about it, I know of a blogger who fits the description and it's definitely not you.