[Peace-discuss] Lamont pulling close to Lieberman

[Robert Naiman]

Less than two months ago, the Connecticut senator was 27 percentage
points ahead of Mr Lamont in the polls. By last week that had shrunk
to six points, with seven long weeks to go before the Democratic
primary election.

---

How a Coalition of Bloggers is Turning the Democratic Donkey
Veteran politicians under threat from 'netroots' uprising that
bypasses corporate kingmakers
Julian Borger, Guardian, June 22, 2006


Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the
three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was
cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the
64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling
victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.
Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to
pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and
anti-war bloggers outraged at Mr Lieberman's gung-ho support for the
Iraq invasion.

Less than two months ago, the Connecticut senator was 27 percentage
points ahead of Mr Lamont in the polls. By last week that had shrunk
to six points, with seven long weeks to go before the Democratic
primary election.

Over the weekend, in a sure sign of nerves, the Lieberman camp "went
negative", producing a much-ridiculed attack advert in the form of a
cartoon portraying the upstart as a bear cub running as a proxy for
Republican interests.

What seemed at first to be a quixotic challenge to a Democratic titan
is turning into an epic battle that could signal the direction the
party will take.

It is a test of strength between the old way of doing politics built
around a hierarchical party machine and the new campaigns fought by
the so-called "netroots", who organise themselves and raise money on
the web. The first netroots uprising was the Howard Dean insurgency,
but when the former Vermont governor imploded as a candidate in 2004
the new politics lost some of its glamour.

If Mr Lamont stages an upset in the Connecticut primaries on August 8,
it may signal the point of no return for American politics. "It will
change the kind of person who goes into politics," said Arianna
Huffington, who runs the political blog Huffington Post. "It will end
the dominance of consultants who have been running campaigns in the
same focus-group, poll-driven way that has taken the soul out of
politics."

For the time being, this conflict between old and new is being fought
out principally inside the Democratic party. That is mostly because
the Republicans went through a similar shake-up two decades ago,
driven by more basic technology. Social conservatives used talk radio
to put their stamp on the party, making abortion a litmus test for
candidates, for instance. Rightwing bloggers are ploughing the same
furrow and consequently having less of an impact. Meanwhile, the
Republican establishment has quietly incorporated the other elements
of the revolution, such as internet fundraising, into its arsenal.

The blossoming of the web has turned the Democratic party on its head.
When liberal bloggers held a convention in Las Vegas this month, many
heavyweights were in attendance. Harry Reid, the party's Senate
leader, gave the keynote address. A former presidential hopeful,
retired general Wesley Clark, worked the corridors and Mark Warner, a
former Virginia governor and leading presidential candidate for 2008,
threw a $50,000 party for bloggers, wooing them with champagne,
chicken satay and a chocolate fountain. Access to opinion-makers was
worth every cent, a Warner spokeswoman said

The star of the ball was Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a 34-year-old
liberal super-blogger. His running commentary on Democratic politics,
the Daily Kos, is the most popular political blog in the country with
more than 500,000 hits a day, and his support has been critical to Mr
Lamont's challenge.

"It's a testament to how much influence we have that this race is even
competitive," he told the Guardian. "Incumbents almost never lose, but
people in Connecticut were tired of seeing the party perverted by Joe
Lieberman ... This is a testament to people power."

A video ad for Mr Moulitsas's new book, Crashing the Gate, shows a
line of people tugging on a rope in an unsuccessful effort to move a
donkey (the symbol for the Democratic party). Mr Moulitsas walks past
them and gets it going with a sharp kick to the backside.

No one now doubts the power of the internet to fuel anti-establishment
candidates such as Ned Lamont. It allows them to raise large amounts
of money in small contributions with minimal outlay, bypassing the big
corporate donors who were once the kingmakers.

The technique was pioneered by the Dean campaign, and the breakthrough
came at one of its lowest points when the candidate gave a
disastrously poor performance on a television talk show.

Joe Trippi, his campaign manager, recalled: "I getting ready to pack
my bags when my web manager came in and said, 'Something incredible is
happening. We're raising more money per minute than we ever have.'
People were not prepared to see the end of his candidacy. That was the
moment when I thought, we're really changing things."

In this year's congressional campaigns, internet fundraising is the norm.

"The Dean campaign got everybody focused on the money," said David
Corn, the Washington editor for the Nation magazine, who also runs a
blog. "You didn't have to use the candidate's time, which is your most
precious resource. Put a tin cup on the internet and it would
magically fill."

That is potentially good news for insurgents. It might allow
challengers such as Mark Warner to stop Hillary Clinton in the
Democratic primaries. The New York senator is the queen of the
traditional fundraising circuit. But in the anti-war blogosphere, she
is excoriated. Mr Warner, not having served in Congress, does not
carry the burden of a voting record on the war. And while Ms Clinton
stayed away from Las Vegas last week, Mr Warner used it to lay the
groundwork for a guerrilla campaign. The former Virginia governor has
also hired Jerome Armstrong, a Dean veteran now working on a whole new
arsenal of web campaigning tools for 2008.

Arguably the most revolutionary part of the Dean experiment has not
been embraced so enthusiastically by the politicians. It involved
devolving real decision-making power to the activists, allowing them
to have a say in setting the campaign agenda. For many Dean veterans,
that devolution of power was what really energised the insurgency.
They point out that Iowa, where the anti-war presidential bid
collapsed, was one of the few states where they relied on a
traditional campaign.

"What we figured out was there was extraordinary passion and energy
and vitality out there. We didn't figure out how to use it properly,"
said Zephyr Teachout, who ran the Dean web campaign. "It's like
finding oil. The first machines don't run that well on it, and it
takes a while to figure out the combustion engine."

If the only lesson politicians draw from the Dean experience is that
the web is a good place to raise money, Ms Teachout argues, they will
fail to break through the apathy and cynicism of the electorate. But
she has left politics and is teaching at the University of Vermont.
The top "Deaniacs" who stayed in politics are mostly working as
fundraising consultants for Democrats in Washington. It is far from
clear at this stage who has coopted whom - the blogosphere or the
political establishment.