When You're A Blog Every Blogging Pol Looks Like a Winner

On Bloggers, Dean and the Illusion of Central Position

I'd never dis the Doc, but I can respectfully disagree with Mr. Searls. Earlier today and just below, I posted a pointer to Doc Searls and David Weinberger's insightful Internet 101 refresher. But later today, I came, via The Professor, upon a Searls prognostication on the end of the politics as we know it and the dawn of a brighter finer political day. All because of blogs!

Sigh. There's a whiff of blogshot in the air these days as, fresh from the Iraq episode, blogging is starting to feel it has real traction in the larger political and social host. And, hey, a lot of bloggers on the Left are feeling dissed and left behind after the triumph of the Warbloggers and feel, hey, it is their turn now.

Searls, like a lot of Blogworld is all het up over the fact that our pols are suddenly 'blogging like it is 1999,' or 2004, or whenever.

I discovered this morning that Tom Watson isn't the only blogging MP. Richard Allen, a Liberal Democrat representing Sheffield Hallam, has one too. Add those to the Kucinich blog and the Howard Dean jihad, and it looks like the lefties are taking the same kind of early lead in electoral politics that the warbloggers took in conversation leading up to the Iraq war.

Whoa, Doc! Just step away from the vehicle and keep your keyboard where we can see it.

The good Doctor then brings up Andrew Sullivan's nifty little squiblet that "bigness" is both bad, and, between the two parties, has got us surrounded. Alas, it is all too true. But then it is a big and complicated political world and, for a lot of things, bigness is the only answer.

I appreciate the longing for a kinder, gentler nation; for simpler times. for a world like yesterday but with broadband connections on the house. I just don't see it happening until a few very large issues spelled, for starters, "Korea," "Africa," "AIDS," "Globalism," "Global Freemarket Capitalism," "Global Terrorism," and "Global Thermonuclear War" are put to bed with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Like Gay Marriage in the near and far term, Big Government is a done deal for the duration. A lot of people don't like it, but a lot more accept it than pine for its demise. And in a Democracy, numbers count.

But it is then that Searls introduces us to the real dream he is having as Pols blog on:

I sense an opening here for a practical libertarian sensibility coming to the fore, from the grass roots; from the blogs. [Emphasis added]

In this statement, I realized again that, at bottom, the Libertarian philosophy is one of the primal energy sources of the Net and that, from time to time, all things must return to it for renewal. Darpanet, Usenet, Internet, Web, Blogworld -- a continuous evolution with the same deep foundation; the same political dreams of the Founders. No, not everyone using the Net is a Libertarian. Not even close. But, at its deepest core the Net is libertarian. Why? Because much of the basic deep software on which the Net runs was written by people with a deep Libertarian bent. Not a bad thing, but a true thing. In fact the Internet, in all its manifestations, is the closest thing to a libertarian world that the libertarians are ever likely to have.

Does that mean the Libertarian dreams of the Net will ever map to the world dimensional? As much as I might like to believe that, I cannot. You might feel differently but hey, this is a libertarian space, and I do my thing, you do your thing, and if we meet a terrible beauty is born.

To return to the thought at the top of the file, when you're a blog everything looks like a post. I'm not among those whose pulse starts to race when yet another pol enters the blogrolls. I don't think it is all that significant. Why? First because it is very premature to start picking winners and losers and the reasons why. Second, because I don't think for a moment these PoliBloggers are sincere. Reasons?

Number one, they are politicians and have learned to fake sincerity from the time they ran for Junior Class President.

Number two, they noticed that Howard Dean and his Internet efforts got him some serious start-up money. Nothing like the whiff of serious money to get politicians active in anything, but just because they 'hold our hands, it doesn't mean they're going to be taking long warm showers with us until the wee hours of the morning.'

Number three: "Hey, Howard Dean is on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and Howard's a blogger, man. He gets it! He really, really gets it!"

Okay, so he gets it. I agree. And it is a wonderful thing to behold. But is Dean going to get the White House and if he does will he be the 'First Internet President, and start a "blogspot.whitehouse.gov/?"

To the first question, "Abort, Retry, Fail."

Alas, Howard Dean, Man of the Cyberpeople, is not going to be President this time around. What we are seeing here is a classic case of peaking far, far too early. What we are also seeing is the terrible political condition known as "knowing far too much too soon" about a candidate few have heard about before. And the more you know about Howard Dean, the nicer he seems as a man and the less fit he seems as a potential president.

Presidents have to map to their times and we are not in a Mondale Moment in this country. Dean supporters, since they are heavily left-populace-grassroots-green, are caught in the delusion that drives the Left -- the delusion of a world that would be at peace if only the United States would stop trying to protect itself. Bush is betting dollars to donuts that the vast majority does not share this view. And speaking of donuts, has anyone pointed out that $7 million is chump change when you are running for President. The current ante is up in the hundreds of millions as I recall.

But hope dies hard, and when a man shows up that not only says things that make the left feel good about itself, but uses the tools of the cyberlibertarian realm in a manner that seems effective, then it is understandable that those deeply embedded in the cyberculture and Blogworld start to perceive a luminosity around a candidate that is not visible to the vast unconnected, unwired, and unconcerned multitudes.

It is axiomatic that there's a long way to go until the fateful November of 2004 and a lot can happen. It may well be that Bush can be defeated and that the Democrats can surge back and make the world safe from The Patriot Act and lower taxes. But the kind of macro-events necessary to make that happen ( massive economic downturn, abject failure of pre-emptive foreign policy, simmering sex scandal, etc...) will not have anything to do with the ability of a candidate or his cyberwranglers to type a lot of text into the entry body panel in Movable Type and hit "Save."

The Libertarians have been waiting for decades for the Internet to get big enough to elect a libertarian to a significant national office. Hasn't happened and is very unlikely to happen. Here's hoping that Blogworld won't go down the same path of hubris and find itself dead-ended in the Illusion of Central Position.

Posted by Vanderleun at August 4, 2003 02:19 PM | TrackBack