Pandermonium

by digby

Ana Marie Cox’s latest dispatch from YKOS online cautions all you funny little bumpkins who have never been to a political bash before to be careful of being co-opted by the elite. She’s been a real “journalist” for almost five minutes now so she understands how to handle being handled. You, on the other hand, are putty in their hands. Word to the wise.

But Cox is very confused about something else. She writes:

Many marveled that Warner would spend so much on bloggers — bloggers! — especially given that the progressive Internet movement has yet to claim a significant general election victory. But from publicity perspective, the campaign got a significant bang for its buck. “Think about it,” said a Warner staffer, “If we threw this kind of thing for the DNC [Democratic National Committee], it would be just another party.” As it was, the event’s buzz reverberated throughout the community and into the mainstream media.

Warner was the first Presidential hopeful to commit to coming to Yearly Kos. Jerome Armstrong, the co-author of “Crashing the Gate” with Yearly Kos namesake Markos Moulitsas, is the governor’s Internet consultant and unofficial blogger liaison. Clearly, the Warner campaign has great hopes for leveraging what convention-goers call “the netroots.” Yet to judge by Warner’s actual speech, the netroots are just another constituency, a Democratic special-interest group to be placated by a campaign promise or two. Aside from a warm-up that referenced the night’s festivities, Warner delivered his time-tested stump speech to the crowd, its paeans to the need for education and national security indistinguishable from what he might say to the Milwaukee teacher’s association or the Charleston VFW. This lack of special treatment—or absence of pandering—is either a sign of respect or confusion.

(Note that “many” marveled. Not the vague and ill defined “some” that that George Bush uses all the time, but “many.” How many, I wonder? And who? Were they really, really cool insiders who know about this stuff, or the hillbillies from Mud Holler who don’t know nothin’ bout no big time politickin’? Just curious.)

But that’s not why I highlighted this paragraph in her otherwise fairly uninformative and ennervating piece. Cox’s observations about politicians pandering to the netroots as a special interest show she misunderstands the meaning of both special interest and pandering.

A “special interest group,” by definition, has a special interest. Like the environment. Or gun rights. If Warner or any other candidate saw the netroots as a special interest group, what’s the special interest? Net neutrality? Free broadband? Censorship?

I’m not saying that we don’t have an interest in keeping the net free from government interference etc., but that’s just a basic necessity to keep doing what we’re doing. Our “special interest” is progressive politics — which is a pretty broad definition of “special.” We care about all the same stuff that Democrats everywhere do and we are perhaps even more interested than most in hearing the whole program, how it’s presented and what the priorities are, because we are a communication medium and we will be spreading the good news if we hear it. So, it’s wrong to say that Warner made a mistake in not tailoring a speech to the Netroots. There is simply no way to pander to our special interest because we have no special interest. The netroots are just grassroots progressives organized in a new way.

She goes on to claim that Dean, on the other hand, did pander to the conventioneers as a special interest group by giving a partisan speech. If the Chairman of the Democratic party is considered to be pandering when he gives a rousing pep talk to a group of hard core grassroots Democrats then let the panderfest begin. It’s part of the job description. (I’ll make sure to let the broadcasters know that when Bill Cohwer gives a halftime pep talk to the Steelers next season, they should refer to it as pandering.)

Cox spends the rest of her column observing that bloggers yearn to be mainstream journalists, but don’t have the skills. She may not know much about how politics work, but Cox’s current gig at TIME magazine as their ex-blogger expert shows her to be uniquely qualified to comment on that particular subject.

Update:

Cox was reportedly distraught that her notebook went missing during the convention. Somebody found it.

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