Bloggers on the Bus by Eric Boehlert

Author:Eric Boehlert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CLINTON BLOGGERS WERE not naïve. They understood that their candidate was never going to win favor among the liberal writers and their activist readers. Bloggers were about ousting the Beltway establishment, about surging up from the grassroots and taking the reins of power from Party insiders who had become complacent under layers of consultants and corporate lobbyists. Bloggers were about embracing the new generation of Democratic leaders and shoving aside, if necessary, the old entrenched K Street players who had lost touch with the progressive base. The blogosphere represented crashing the gates, not queuing up behind a safe Beltway insider like Clinton.

So yes, Clinton bloggers knew that their candidate was probably going to get roughed up online. Yet, much to everyone’s surprise, for most of the 2007 campaign season the junior senator from New York maintained a respectable amount of support, even some begrudging admiration, online.

Clinton and her campaign also appeared to be more actively engaged with the blogosphere and the online movement. In 2006 the campaign flew in more than a dozen bloggers to New York City for a private two-hour lunch with Bill Clinton. The following year it was candidate Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, who battled on-air with Bill O’Reilly, defending the netroots when O’Reilly compared bloggers to Nazis and hate merchants. And it was Hillary Clinton who voted against a Republican-backed amendment to publicly condemn the netroots cornerstone organization MoveOn.org in September 2007. On the eve of Gen. David Petraeus’s Senate testimony on the U.S. military’s surge strategy in Iraq the liberal grassroots group made headlines by buying a full-page ad in the New York Times asking, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” By contrast, Obama skipped the vote on the blogosphere-bashing amendment.

Bloggers were still angry that Obama had endorsed Sen. Joe Lieber man for reelection in 2006 in the face of a massive progressive movement to elect a far more liberal candidate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont. Obama praised Lieberman at the time as “a man with a good heart, with a keen intellect, who cares about the working families of America.” Lieberman would repay the Obama favor in 2008 by campaigning at John McCain’s side during the general election. Bloggers were appalled in October 2007, when Obama invited a gay-bashing preacher to join his campaign on the road.

Bloggers were frustrated that Obama refused to embrace mandates to ensure universal health care for all, which had long been a progressive policy touchstone. They were bewildered when the Obama campaign released opposition research attacking the progressive stalwart Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who had been critical of Obama’s health care plan. The maneuver was “off the rails,” complained the blogger Ezra Klein. They were irked when Obama borrowed GOP talking points and belittled trial lawyers on the primary campaign trail. And they couldn’t understand why Obama blamed Democrats for creating an overly partisan atmosphere in Washington during Bush’s tenure, or suggested that as president he’d be able to create a new postpartisan era inside the Beltway.

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