Two Brief Articles About The Politics And Blogging

Candidates Face New Test:Winning Netroots Primary


By AMY SCHATZJanuary 22, 2007; Page A4
WASHINGTON -- Soon after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her bid for the presidency on the Internet, her campaign was boasting of its success in one of the most important new presidential battlefields: the Netroots Primary.
Within hours of launching her bid Saturday, her campaign Web site had attracted 10,000 messages of support, 2,200 submissions for its blog contest and had signed up people to its email list at the rate of 100 a minute, the campaign said.
1 ROAD TO 2008

Who will throw their hats into the ring? A look at who's in the race2, who's out and who's somewhere in the middle for the 2008 presidential election.
Mrs. Clinton's decision to enter the presidential race online and conduct a "national conversation" in live video Internet chats before heading to campaign isn't the conventional route taken by presidential hopefuls. This year, however, candidates are making extra efforts to win the favor -- and money -- of keepers of Web logs, or bloggers, and other Internet activists.
Mrs. Clinton's embrace of the Internet shows how seriously candidates are taking the power of the online activist community. Bloggers and other Netroots activists didn't get Howard Dean elected in 2004 or Joseph Lieberman unelected in 2006, but they certainly played a big, vocal role in both races. Unlike other early primary contests, there is no set date to decide which candidate wins or loses the Netroots primary, but early support by the Internet community this year, at least for Democratic candidates, could help decide which candidate wins the party's nomination.
"It's a fact that in Democratic politics, [the Internet has] grown increasingly important and it's par for the course for candidates to pay attention and to communicate to this community," said Peter Daou, the Clinton campaign's Internet director and former head of blog outreach for the Kerry-Edwards 2004 presidential campaign.


Inhofe, IMHO

Pundits do it. Scientists do it. Even Donald Trump does it. So why shouldn't Congress blog too?
As the former Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican Jim Inhofe was a coruscating critic of climate change alarmism. Now in the minority, he plans to make sure his voice is heard over the din of the media-savvy environmental groups through a new blog. His team even intends to make a bit of Congressional history by conducting the first-ever live Senate blog during the president's State of the Union Address tonight. Watch out, National Review Online.
This is the latest in Senator Inhofe's strategy of trying to shout louder than his many opponents in the environmental community. His media team is somewhat notorious in Washington for their "facts of the day" and "weekly closer" emails that attempt to get out another side of the story. And their new blog is already making waves, not to mention causing some congressional tech malfunctioning.
Last week the minority blog issued a scathing indictment of Heidi Cullen, host of the Weather Channel's weekly global warming program "The Climate Code." Ms. Cullen had called for the American Meteorological Society to decertify any TV weatherperson who exhibits undue skepticism about climate warming. The widely-read Drudge Report linked to the Inhofe site's critique of Ms. Cullen, generating so much traffic that the Senate's web servers shut down. A subsequent email update from the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms said the link had been bringing "30-50,000 queries per hour to senate.gov."
No word yet as to when Senator Inhofe himself might roll up his sleeves and post a few items. Let's hope the Senate can get its still-sluggish servers up to speed by then. The blog can be found at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?