Guests: Jerome Armstrong of "MyDD" and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of "Daily Kos"
Transcriber's note: Both Jerome and Markos talk fast and occasionally (in this recording) somewhat indistinctly. For that reason, the transcriber admits to doing a little repair work -- minimal editing -- to make their responses clearer and easier to read.
Diane Rehm: This weekend a blogger hired by the Washington Post resigned after only three days on the job. He quit after bloggers questioned the authenticity of some of his earlier writings. Daily Kos was one of the blogs that posted an example of the alleged plagiarism. Markos Moulitsas started Daily Kos in 2002. Today it's one of the most popular political blogs in the world. Jerome Armstrong is also a blogger. Moulitsas and Armstrong have written a new book on progressive politics. It's also about what's wrong with the Democratic Party. It's titled "Crashing the Gate."... A companion website to the book, "Crashing the Gate," goes online today. It's located at crashingthegate.com. [Don't miss the great ad!] Good morning to both of you!...
Kos: We could think of no better place to start a book tour than on this show!
Rehm: I'm delighted! Markos: tell us about what role your blog played in the downfall of the conservative Washington Post blogger.
Kos: Well, there are two major issues at play here. One: washingtonpost.com hired this conservative blogger...
Rehm: ...whose name is...
Kos: ...Ben Domenech, supposedly to provide balance at the website. Supposedly there was a liberal blogger and there was need for balance when in reality there was no such liberal blogger. There was a journalist who was very critical of the Administration. But there are lots of reasons to be critical of this administration and many conservatives are also being critical of this administration. So this notion that they were going to balance out a journalist with a partisan, activist, conservative blogger was really, really ridiculous. So that was the first major issue. Second major issue: washingtonpost.com, an internet operation, obviously did not know how to use Google and do research on who they were hiring. It turns out that this blogger was a serial plagiarizer from college on to his most recent work. So it was, as we saw it, a huge black eye for washingtonpost.com and their executive director, Jim Brady.
Rehm: But did you then go to this guy's website? Did you then begin to track his background? How did that happen? Take us through the process, Jerome?
JA: I think it started, actually, in comments. People were looking at his readings and somebody noticed in a comment, Hey, that looks like something I've read before.
Rehm: Really!
JA: So it actually wasn't started by us at all. It was just by the people who go to these websites...
Rehm: This is kind of a fact-checking that goes on among bloggers themselves?
Kos: One of the big powers of what we do is that it's not just me, or Jerome, or another blogger doing this work. It's the fact that we have hundreds of thousands if not millions of readers who are also working together and they're all doing the research. Collectively we have the ability to provide a kind of research in a way that's not easily possible [inaudible]...
Rehm: But at the same time, Jerome, you have to acknowledge that, from time to time, some not so factual information gets posted on some blog.
JA: It does, but the blogs have a very self-correcting way, since we can all link to each other, something that's [inaudible]... that can come out very quickly.
Rehm: Do you think it does? Does the truth catch up quickly enough, or... once something is posted, you know, it kind of lingers for a while!
JA: It does linger. Markos and I give an example in the book of when we worked for Howard Dean how a comment that was made by one of the other staffers that we were actually hired to say good things about Dean on the blog. That got in the whole rightwing machine, on Fox News, on Drudge Report and others picked up on it on the right. So we had to go out there and battle that with the truth. The truth was we were not hired by Dean to go out and say good things. I stopped blogging completely while we worked with Dean. So these things can get out there. And you have to battle them.
Rehm: What about Mr. Domenech's apology? Do you accept that?
Kos: It wasn't mine to accept. He had a duty to his readers and to the Washington Post and to the National Review which he wrote for to provide accurate, original content. He did not do that. He wasn't my constituent. He wasn't my employee. So he doesn't need to apologize to me! He apologized to the people who were his constituents and whether they accepted it or not really is up to them at the end of the day.
Rehm: Did you have any objection to the Post hiring Mr. Domenech?
Kos: I didn't personally. Although I'd say that if they hired him -- and this was the main complaint in the beginning -- that they need to hire somebody else who represents the opposite viewpoint to a very partisan, activist standpoint. If they hired one on each side, that would be fine.
Rehm: But that's not what they did.
Kos: They didn't do that. That would be the problem again if they just went out and replaced him with another conservative blogger. If they want to hire a blogger, that's great. But hire a Democratic blogger too!
Rehm: Help us to understand, Markos, this whole business of blogging. I think there are a lot of people -- those who use the internet, those who don't -- who don't quite understand how it works.
Kos: It really cuts this notion of "people power." The blogs really eliminate in a lot of ways the traditional media gatekeepers, the producers, the editors who once upon a time decided what people could listen to, what they could read, what they could hear. And suddenly we have a medium which allows anyone to be a publisher. Anyone can set up a blog for free. The tools are free. All you need is time and something to say. All of a sudden we have the ability to bypass those gatekeepers and talk about the things we think are important. "We" is a collection of thousand of bloggers and we're all talking about different things, but every once in a while we hit an issue we all think is important and we all speak with one voice. This happens on the left, it happens on the right and it happens in the middle. It happens in sports and entertainment and different areas. It's not even about politics at the end of the day. It's people wanting to talk about the things they find important.
Rehm: What was your background? Did you go to college? Did you want to become a journalist? What was your own thinking?
Kos: Well, I grew up in El Salvador. I came to this country because of the civil war in 1980. I served in the military, in the Army for three years, '89 to '92. I got two degree in college at Northern Illinois University, and I got a law degree at Boston University -- knowing within five minutes that I never wanted to be a lawyer. But I rode it out because it was a good way to kill three years of my life in a respectable manner that my mother wouldn't feel ashamed about! I was working in the technology sector. I was project manager at a technology company in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I started the site because I needed to talk about these issues in a very hostile political climate, in 2002 when criticizing the President was considered to be treasonous, was considered to be seditious. It wasn't the sort of thing you did at the time to become rich and famous and powerful and influential. You did it because you wanted a voice in our political culture, in the system. And that's what we ended up doing.
Rehm: Jerome, how did you get involved?
JA: Well, neither of us came from a political background. I was just finishing grad school when I started blogging.
Rehm: Grad school?
JA: Portland State. In mediation and conflict resolution... That's something quite common among a lot of the people who are activists online is that we've worked in politics for decades before it became [possible] to actively get involved online.
Rehm: Did you feel, as Markos did, that somehow this would be an opportunity to speak out that you weren't provided elsewhere?
JA: Well, initially it was just taking the opportunity to speak out. I didn't realize where it would go. It wasn't until I had comments on the blog and I started realizing there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way I did. Because they were speaking it in the comments and as other people started blogging.
Rehm: What were the first comments?
JA: Initially, one of the things I started blogging about in 2002 was Howard Dean. And it was the first website that was talking about Howard Dean. All of a sudden people were showing up and it became the sort of nexus of the Howard Dean campaign and then later on he launched his campaign with his own campaign website. But before that time, this was just a blog which was really just, Hey, this guy has something to say! They were interested in it.
Rehm: What were you saying about Howard Dean, Markos?
Kos: I was definitely an early fan. I tried to remain neutral for some time. It didn't last very long! I became a partisan Dean supporter but Daily Kos became a place where all the supporters of different candidates could come and debate and argue and fight and otherwise discuss the elections. The things about our sites, MyDD and Daily Kos, in 2002 was that you could not find information about the 2006 midterm elections or talk about the presidential campaign anywhere else. The media really wasn't that focused on those topics at the time, and the little there was could be found in newspapers or on TV so they couldn't talk about it. And most people, at the end of the day, don't really want to talk politics three years out -- in general, the at-large public. So you had a core group of political junkies that are desperate to discuss these issues and suddenly we had a medium where they could all come together and talk about these things when none of their friends or family wanted to talk about it just yet.
Rehm: How did you create the blog in the first place? How many people were on the blog?
Kos: Well, when I first created it in early 2002, it was about 10 people.
Rehm: 10 people!
JA: Yes, they start off very small -- with your email and a link to your mom and dad or something...
Rehm: [laughs]... and then? people start...?
JA: Things like Google. All your content goes there and it all becomes more viral on the web, Somebody might email another friend; another website might link to it; and it goes from there.
Rehm: ...Lots of folks would like to know whether you were paid, are paid, for what you do on behalf of a particular candidate. For example: Howard Dean.
JA: Right. It's an issue which was just addressed the other day by the Campaign Finance Reform with the FEC. It is an important part of the blogs in the community because there is an element of authenticity there that you're actually speaking, so they want to make sure you're not -- those words are not -- paid for by other people. And so when I went to work with Howard Dean, I stopped blogging completely. The issue came up again this year. I happened work on Sherrod Brown's website and I decided to stop blogging completely as well.
Rehm: When you were working on her [sic] website, what were you doing?
JA: On Sherrod's? I was formulating all of the strategy basically for online outreach in terms of how the website was going to look, what we're going to do in terms of ramping that up. It wasn't like an in-depth strategic thing but I was working on his campaign and so, even though I did put a disclaimer on the website -- if you clicked you could see that I was working with him, it's a valid response that people want to have something upfront. They recognize that blogs are something that come from people's own hearts, what they feel. So I can understand where people come from on that regard.
Rehm: Markos, what about you and blogging for Howard Dean?
Kos: During the Howard Dean campaign, I actually had a prominent disclaimer in the same slot that's now occupied by my most expensive advertising. After the Howard Dean campaign, essentially, I quit the consulting. Jerome and I had a consulting firm. We dissolved that at the end of 2004. He liked consulting enough to keep doing it. I was happy being a fulltime blogger. Now I do absolutely no consulting.
Rehm: How much do you get paid, or how much do you earn through your blogs?
Kos: Enough that I was able to buy a house in Berkeley. So I'm doing fairly well financially. I reinvest a lot of it back into the... I treat it as a real business. And so I invest a lot of money keeping the site at the cutting edge of technology. I do pretty well.
Rehm: And do you solicit the ads that appear on your blog? Or did they come to you?
Kos: They come to me. It's a great ad network, actually, because it allows people to self-serve their own advertising. I never deal with an advertiser directly.
Rehm: And Jerome, you sort of got out of it.
JA: Yes. I still... MyDD still gets ad revenue. There's a number of other bloggers on MyDD.com that I split up the ad revenue with. I also work with Governor Warner of Virginia on his federal PAC and a couple of other organizations here in DC.
Rehm: Of course, this isn't really a book about blogging as much as it's a book about progressive politics. Talk about what you mean by "progressive politics." Jerome?
JA: When we say progressive politics, what it really comes down to is people, getting people involved in the process. For too long the Democratic Party has been a party that congregates around conventional wisdom here within DC. It ignores the people involved in the Party at the very grassroots, going and getting involved in a precinct election -- how you get involved with the Democratic Party at a very local level in order to impact and grow the Party as a community and at a very basic level. And so what we're trying to do, and what we mean by progressives -- progressives in the sense of taking that power back in their own hands and getting involved with the changing direction of the Democratic Party and then we'll change the nation if we can do that!
Rehm: What do you mean by "progressive politics," Markos?
Kos: You know, this is an interesting question because people have been trying, for the last couple of years, to pin us ideologically. Are we far left wacko liberals or are we centrist-sellouts to the right wing? Everybody has an opinion of where we really stand ideologically. And what we've been saying is that there are core shared principles within the Democratic Party. We are a big Party. There is a center, a left, and a right of the Democratic Party. We're not really interested in engaging in that battle because at the end of the day there is a Republican government right now that is not interested in negotiating or even talking to people who are in that 48% that voted for John Kerry. They've written off half the country. So we, as progressives, are people who believe in progressive ideals, whether it's the environment or standing up for workers' rights or standing up for women's rights -- or any of those issues. No matter where we stand on those issues, none of us are getting what we want. So we're more interested in working together to elect Democrats again, take back control of Congress, take back the White House, because at the end of the day that's the only way we can... at that point we can start talking about, well, where do we stand on particular issues. Right now, no matter where we stand in the Democratic Party, we're losing and we can't keep doing what we're doing.
Rehm: Why do you think we're losing?
Kos: This is exactly what our book is about. We identified three core problems. Originally when we started writing the book, we thought it was an issue of branding. The Democratic Party doesn't rally have a strong brand. Ask ten people what the Democrats stand for, you're going to get ten different answers. You don't get that with Republicans. What we found as we went out and talked to people -- we went all over the country and talked to hundred of people -- is that really before we talk about the brand, we have to talk about the core infrastructure of the Party. The right wing has spent 30 years building a core infrastructure. They have think tanks and leadership institutes to develop their idea and to convert them to a governing blueprint. They have a media machine that promotes those ideas to the American public. And they have a great election infrastructure to sell those ideas.
Rehm: But you know maybe Republicans are simply smarter than Democrats at politics.
JA: On campaigning and elections, we'd agree with that. They use strategies and tactics that, if you go over into the business world, they're using today. We're looking back into the 1980's and still doing the same things in terms of running our campaigns.
Rehm: How much do you think talk shows have played into this whole sort of dissolution of the center of the Democratic Party?
JA: Talk show hosts? Well, they've played a great part in arousing the base of the Republican Party, for sure. People like Rush Limbaugh talk to 20,000,000 a day! And they instill the Republican message into those voters.
Kos: That's part of their machine -- their ability to market their ideas. They reach a third of their base on a weekly basis. We don't have anything like that on the left, a partisan liberal media that could promote the partisan progressive message to our base.
Rehm: Then why do you think that, at this point in time, the White House, the President, the Administration is losing its support for, for example, the war?
JA: They've had so many huge failures and that's one of them. People are finally, like, We've given them enough slack. And the country, many people feel, is going in the wrong direction.
Rehm: So you think it's the people themselves. It's not the Democratic Party that is finally convincing people that what the White House is doing is going in the wrong direction?
JA: I wish it was the Democratic Party!
Rehm: You wish!
Kos: Given how bad things are going for Republicans now, reality isn't being very kind to conservative ideology at this point. Given how bad things are going, you'd think Democrats would make huge gains this fall. What I'm seeing, actually, is that people are disillusioned. They see the Republicans are making a mess of it. They do not see Democrats saying, We offer a clear alternative. Democrats are content to sit back and say, Republicans are going to screw up so much people will vote for us. What I'm seeing is that Democrats are screwing up so much that people won't vote at all.
Rehm: Here's an email on precisely that from Bill who says he's just finished reading your book. He thinks it's great. He says, "Why are Democratic leaders in Congress or in Washington so spineless? What can we real Democrats do to make a spinal transplant to the leaders who ought to be representing two thirds of the American people who think this country's going in the wrong direction?
JA: The Democratic Party now in larger part than ever in history relies upon small donors for their financial base. With campaign finance reform, they got rid of soft dollar donations of a million dollars or more. They now rely upon individuals across the country. And so we can really change the party with our dollars. Tell them: If you don't change and respond to the strategies and tactics we want, we'll give our money to someone else in the progressive community that does.
Rehm: Here's an email from Howard who says, "With all due respect, what's the difference between a journalist and a blogger? It seems to me a journalist is someone with training and ethics, and the blogger is anyone with a computer."
Kos: If you look at the [range?] of top bloggers, you'll see that there are lawyers, PhD's. I have a JD. I was a journalism major in college. We're all qualified in certain ways but that's not what got us where we are. It's because we had a voice and we built credibility over the long haul. That's why people start reading us.
JA: There's 4 million blogs altogether out there.
Rehm: 4 million!
Kos: This notion that you have to have credentials to have a voice among the American public is exactly what we're trying crush here. You don't have to have proper credentials. You build credibility the old fashioned way. You prove yourself by actually doing good work.
Rehm: Jerome, you came up with the term "net roots." What does that mean?
JA: What I was looking for was a term that would reflect the activism that people do online and all the different ways we spread the message. You can write in other people's blogs, or comment, or send an email, or participate in some sort of interactive thing on another website. Ultimately, when the netroots really comes into power is when they interact with things that are live, in the local area. So that's the interaction between netroots and grass roots.
Rehm: Here's a caller from South Bend, IN.
Steve: ...I'm running for Congress in northern Indiana. I'm an avid reader of and participant in Daily Kos, so it's great to talk to you. I have a question on campaign finance and progressive Democrats. First of all on the Democratic Party: I agree that we've got to have candidates and Democrats who have a vision and know how to bring it about and show that they can bring results. Because I think, as I travel around my district, people want results. They don't want to have continuing stagnation. But on campaign finance, I'd like both of your guests to talk about their model. I'm finding that, yes, I'm raising funds through grass roots politics and the internet much easier than I could before. But yet there's still a DC political bent that it's somehow inferior to raising vast sums through the centralized organization. Maybe your guests could comment on that and the power of net roots in terms of providing campaign finance.
JA: One of the things that we advocate for in the decentralization of the Party structure is that, no matter who the Democratic nominee is for federal office that they receive some sort of support from the national committee. Too often they only look at the battleground seats. I don't know exactly which election this is, but they'll look at the battleground seats, fund those with millions of dollars and not give a dime to so many others. So in this case it would be great if the Democratic Party would seed the campaign with $10,000, $20,000 in order to get it off the ground and up and running.
Kos: One of the things that I think people need to realize is that it took conservatives thirty years to build their machine, to build what they have today. This is a long term process. We had, in 2004, the first elections in which people-powered money actually made a difference. It's growing. More and more people are getting involved; more and more people are contributing. Every cycle from now on, more and more people are going to get involved.
Rehm: Let's go to Kalamazoo, MI.
Gerald: ..I'm 69, almost 70 years old. I don't know a lot about the technology and Daily Kos came onto my radar screen a year or so ago. I've got an adopted daughter who was murdered about two years ago. It's a long story but there was a trial last September and a conviction and a sentencing and the family members are allowed to make a statement at the time of sentencing and I worked on mine for months. My statement to the court got around, and somebody in the University of Indiana and asked if they could put it on Daily Kos! Kind of stunned me, but I said, Sure. Anyhow, it's not just the political things but it had to do with abuse, because there was a lot of that involved in the case... and my reaction to the person who committed the crime. I was happy to see that sort of thing on there. There were a number of responses that indicated to me that it was helpful to people.
Rehm: Do you remember that?
Kos: Actually, I do remember that. Right now, every day, about sixty [unclear] post diaries. Some of them are more dramatic like this one, and you do notice. It's incredible how people can talk about these issues even if they're not directly politically related. Because there is a community to support that discussion.
JA: That's why you see Daily Kos getting half a million visitors every day now. Because it's branched beyond just the mundane dealings with elections and campaigns and it's much more of an interactive community where it deals with all things, not just politics.
Rehm: ...One question that I think an awful lot of people have is, If the blogosphere is so powerful, why was there not a better, swifter reaction to the Swift Boats charge against John Kerry?
Kos: Well, we're not that powerful! I'm definitely not one of those people who think the blogs are going to conquer the world! We are just a piece of the broader puzzle. We actually, in the blogs, knew the Swift Boat attack was coming. The Kerry campaign knew it because we wrote about it three or four months before it happened.
Rehm: Really!
Kos: Everything gets test-marketed in the blog world now. So we saw the conservatives running these ideas and saying, This is what we're going to do. Kerry campaign didn't care. They either dismissed it or thought it wasn't important. We could only do so much. We could draw attention to it. They have to close the deal.
JA: David Brock, whom I'm sure you know, saw this coming from way out. He saw this in May. He noticed them doing it on the internet and he tried to warn Kerry that it was coming, but they didn't listen to the smoke signals.
Rehm: So they could have reacted and if they had reacted, how would you have had them react?
Kos: You know, that's a question of tactics and strategy that really isn't my strong forte. What I can do is to create buzz, I can talk about an issue, and bring it out to the people. But how campaigns react to it, that's something I'm just not good at.
Rehm: Here is someone emailing and asking, "How do I find your blog?"
JA: The blog we have is called "MyDD.com" at www.mydd.com. Markos's is www.dailykos.com. The "Kos" is from Markos...
Kos: One thing to remember about blogs is that our blog may not be everything for you, may not be the right blog for you. There are thousands and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Follow the links. You'll find one that may actually be aligned to what you're interested in.
Rehm: So, if you're interested in finding how many blogs are out there, you're interested in making a tour -- an online tour of blogs! -- how would you go about beginning?
JA: Well, there's a site called technorati.com. They have a little box at the top, a search box, and you can type in any subject you want to, and it'll show you some of the blogs that are writing or talking about that subject.
Rehm: I see. So if you write in "politics" I'd think there'd be a lot of blogs out there!
JA: Too many! You'd want to get as specialized as you could.
Rehm: By the way, here's an email from Jill in Ann Arbor, MI, who responds to the earlier emailer. She says, "The emailer questioning the credentials of bloggers should remember that Judith Miller has credentials but not credibility." For those of you who read the New York Times, I think you'll recall the name, Judith Miller who wrote on the front page of the New York Times a great deal before the US went into the war in Iraq.... Let's go now to Dallas TX.
Larry: I live in the city of Dallas and Gore carried Dallas county by 60,000 votes. The county is, I would say, left of center. The problem I have with the Democrats and I'm a Democrat -- I attend all the conventions and whatnot -- is that there's a gulf between Washington and the rest of us out here. We would back, at least the Democrats I know, we would back Feingold on his censure resolution. If the shoe were on the other foot, the Republicans would be tearing at the president like cats. But the Democrats are distancing themselves from Feingold. (By the way, I took up Daily Kos through "Buzzflash." They have a link.) When you have Hillary and Lieberman and others backing the war, it's frustrating. The Democratic Party should be somewhere left of center. And that's what Gore did, in the fading days of his campaign. He moved left in order to displace some of the Nader positions. And that's where we belong.
Rehm: So, where do you think Russ Feingold's censure proposal is going to go? If you look just at what's being written on the blogs?
Kos: Let me go a little broader than that. The problems he talks about, about DC Democrats, are exactly the reason we wrote this book. We got tired of losing election after election because they kept doing things the same way. We set out to the states to find a solution to that problem. That's why we talked to people all over the country. The Feingold resolution is a pretty good example of all this because we have these consultants in DC who are risk averse. They don't want to take any chances. They don't want to roil the waters. So they're urging, No, don't do anything because we're going to stay quiet because if we say anything, the right wing is going to attack us and then maybe... we're going to get attacked and I'm not sure what they expect will happen at that point! So it's that caution that's, in a lot of ways, killing us. That's why we're urging more state-based solutions because we're not going to find those solutions in DC.
JA: That caution, from our analysis, comes from a lot of the establishment here in DC from having had two traumatic experiences -- in 1994 loss of Congress when the Republican revolution swept in, and much earlier McGovern's loss in 1972. So there is a timidity in fearing that they might roil up the Republican right. They're a little bit timid about making strong distinctions. How we differ from that is that we became active in politics within the Democratic Party in opposition. An opposition party is only going to take over as majority if they're able to show clear and defined ways of how they differ from the party in power.
Rehm: But it seems as though, out in the public generally, there's more support for Russ Feingold's censure movement than there is in the Democratic Party in the Congress.
Kos: Absolutely! There is a clear distinction between DC Democrats and the rest of the country. I know it's a cliche to talk about "Beltway" and "inside the Beltway" but in this case we're seeing it very clearly. We have Democrats winning in places like Montana and Colorado even though Bush won those states. Democrats are very strong at the state level in so-called "red states." But those lessons aren't filtering down to DC. They're not learning from our successes out in the states.
Rehm: So if you were sitting in Congress right now -- as far as Russ Feingold's censure resolution goes -- and you were doing what you'd like to see other Democrats being and doing, what would you be doing?
JA: Drawing distinctions! The wiretapping issue is a great issue. We have to do that. If we don't do that, then even if we win the election, what do we want?!
Kos: Yes, it's very clear that people are desperate for that distinction, that knowledge of "why I should vote for a Democrat" -- what makes a Democrat different from a Republican. If I was sitting in Congress, I would absolutely ride this issue, because it's getting a lot of great press, they're noticing it, and use that as a platform to not just attack the NSA wiretapping scandal, but also use that as a platform to talk about other issues like Iraq.
Rehm: Here's an email. "Some mainstream journalists are bashing the blogs. Do you think that the mainstream media are fearful they are losing their power, influence and money now that 'working jerks' can access other information that may be more fact-based than the pre-war reports that we were subjected to by the New York Times?"
JA: Well, they've clearly had to change because of the transforming media landscape. Actually one of the backhanded compliments we get with the book is that we actually did some reporting since we went to twenty different states and interviewed 160 people, so we were actually involved in some heavy journalistic activities.
Rehm: Here's another from Paula in San Antonio: "Am I missing out? I read the newspapers every morning. I listen to NPR all day long nearly every day. I watch the local news and the Jim Lehrer News Hour every evening. Who has time for blogs? What's the big deal?" What is she missing out on?
Kos: At least on the liberal side of the blogosphere, what she's missing out on is community. It's being with like-minded people and talking about the issues she cares about. The conservative blogosphere is more like the rest of the media. It's very top-bottom. There's not a lot of community, not a lot of comments. But on the left, it's all about community. We love talking and arguing. People think it's an echo chamber. We're fighting every day over some of these issues! But we get together because we believe and have passion about these issues.
JA: The thing about the time factor, reflecting my own media habits, I don't watch TV. I get my news mostly from the internet. And I think there's more and more people doing that. If you look at the polling numbers about where people are getting the news, they show broadcast TV dropping and the internet rising.
Rehm: Interesting! Radio is still in there!
JA: I'm a listener!
Rehm: Let's go to Old Fort, NC.
Mark: Comment and a quick question: Markos, I really didn't know anything about blogs until election night. I got tired of watching the cable networks' reporting on the election and caught your website on the tickertape on CNN. Got on the website that night and was on it until about three in the morning. Everytime I hit "refresh" it went from excitement to depression as I was watching the returns coming in from Ohio, and about all the disenfranchised voters there. My question is about Howard Dean and how he was so progressive when he was running for president and now he's head of the DNC and you don't hear much about him. I feel he's becoming another one of those DC Democrats. And the progressive nature he had before is getting buried in politics.
Rehm: What do you think, Jerome?
JA: It's tough to work in DC. I've moved over here to Alexandria since I started working with Mark Warner. This is a culture where you're forced to go along a lot of times and it's really hard to buck the trend, but I think you can give Howard Dean credit for what he's doing with the financial resources of the DNC -- which is pushing them out into the states and building up the infrastructure. If we're going to win these elections that are in those states and take back the country on a national level rather than just winning with 50.1% and having a battleground state, it's because we've built up these states nationally.
Rehm: Now that you're working for Mark Warner, you're no longer blogging?
JA: That's right. I'm blogging about the book and on our website we have that, but, as far as politics, I've blogged Mark Warner...
Rehm: You consider Mark Warner a progressive Democrat?
JA: Yes, I do. I think anybody who looks at his record as he performed in Virginia, I think you'd find things across the board: in education, the environment, that he's raised the standards economically. He reformed the tax code in a very progressive manner.
Rehm: Does he fit your idea, Markos, of a progressive Democrat?
Kos: Yes, absolutely. I have my mind open for 2008. I'm not ready to pick a horse yet. But he's definitely a viable candidate. Do I have time to give Dean a little defense?
Rehm: Certainly!
Kos: Dean spends very little time in DC. Actually, he's been butting heads with a lot of the establishment because he's putting money back into the states. He spends a lot of time raising money in the states. He lets that money stay there. He's hiring staff in every single state. People in DC don't like that. They want the money so the consultants can then spend it all on ads two weeks before the election. So they don't like Howard Dean in the city. That's just one reason why I'm still big fan of Howard Dean.
Rehm: Here's an email from Richardson, TX. Hugh asks: "Do you think internet bloggers disclaiming the Dan Rather memogate were organized for rapid email dispersement prior to Dan Rather disclosing the memo on the air?"
JA: I think that's pretty credible. The initial email came to Free Republic from sources in Alabama that had connections directly with Karl Rove.
Rehm: With Karl Rove.
JA: Yes. With a history of working with the Republican establishment. That came out within a couple of hours of when it broke.
Rehm: And the second part of this is: "How did the bloggers have such a unified front that the memos were not authentic, whereas it has still not been established b document experts whether or not the memos were authentic?"
Kos: Well, a lot of time the facts get lost in the story and this is a case where they created such an uproar that it carried its own echo and whatever the facts are, they got lost.
Rehm: Let's take a caller here in DC.
Calvin: ...You don't have to go very very far out into the midwest to see the successes of the Democratic Party. You can see the [inaudible] Kaine v. Kilgore... So that was the [inaudible] Democratic victory that I felt good about. ....[?]... Most of our Democrats are just laying on their backs and allowing things to happen. The second point is this: ...I think the presidential election is not as important as the Democrats taking the House. And I think the House will not be taken by the Democrats until those two powerful Afro-Americans with seniority, Charles Rangell and John Conyers, and they would probably chair, if the House were to become Democratic, the Ways and Means and also the Judiciary Committee. And I just feel, maybe going back to the Jim Crow days, regardless if Democrats or Republicans, those white folks there do not want to see another Adam Clayton Powell situation in which these two African-Americans are heading the two most powerful committees in the House.
Rehm: Jerome?
JA: If the Democrats do take back the House, we're going to see a progressive sweep in all of the committee chairs and I do agree with the caller in terms of Virginia. That was a great election victory with Kaine coming in on Gov. Warner's heels. But it wasn't only that. The Democrats have won delegate races in the state in the last two years as well.
Kos: That's actually something we see across the nation. Ever since the 2004 election, Democrats have been winning special elections everywhere.
Rehm: So what do you predict?
JA: It's great. You know, we have a lot of work to do. The blogs represent a small minority of people who actually vote. We have three, four, five million people. What the Democratic Party needs to do is go out and get three or four of their friends to go and vote with them as well.
Kos: One of the things that we've been telling people, when they had a Democrat who doesn't fit the litmus test as a perfect progressive -- they stray on an issue, maybe choice or the environment or labor -- we say, If we take back the House, look at who's going to be running the committees, people like Chuck Rangell and John Conyers, and think about subpoena power, and think about what a difference that can make in our government as opposed to worrying about your one congressman who may not be a perfect Democrat.