Blue Crab Boulevard

Ready For The Spotlight?

Someone asked at the time of YearlyKos whether the Koz Kidz would be ready for their time in the spotlight. I can't remember who said it, but it was a very pertinent question. It appears to be getting more pertinent every day, too. It's not just TNR coming down on Kos, Newsweek is now taking the offensive with an article that is not at all flattering. In fact, it almost looks as if it is meant to provoke yet another outburst of rage and paranoia. The very start of the article, while appearing to be painting a pretty picture of Zuniga actually starts off with a loaded sentence:

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is sitting on his back porch in Berkeley, Calif., listening to the hummingbirds and explaining his plans to seize control of the Democratic Party. (Emphasis mine)

That is not a neutral stance at all. The article gets worse, too.

But a place in the inner sanctum comes with its challenges—and Kos picked a rough time to join. Last week the GOP rallied around Karl Rove's "cut and run" battle cry and went on the offensive against a Democratic Party that was all over the place on the war. Sen. John Kerry was constantly on cable TV, touting an amendment requiring the redeployment of troops out of Iraq by July 2007; most members of his own party voted against it. The party had better discipline on a more gradual pullout measure backed by Sens. Carl Levin and Jack Reed, voting together, coordinating talking points—and still going down to a sound defeat. The GOP was clearly on the rebound. "They're buoyed by Zarqawi's death and other steps in Iraq, but they're also strengthened by the disarray of the Democrats," says one senior Bush aide, who asked not to be identified speaking about political strategy.

Democrats tried to downplay the significance of the GOP's momentum. "What this indicates is the White House is much better at sloganeering than they are at actually governing and conducting this war," former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards told NEWSWEEK.

Still, the Democrats lost the week in the war over the war, and Moulitsas—who chats with Senate leadership aides several times a week and has brainstormed with Democratic operatives about the fall campaign—could no longer just criticize from the outside. Indeed, the Democrats' failed Iraq strategy—stand together, talk tough and make plans to leave—lined up exactly with the prescriptions found on Daily Kos.

Moulitsas is also learning another downside of membership in the elite: the bigger the liberal sniper gets, the more incoming fire he faces. The talk of the blogosphere last week was "Kosola"—allegations that Moulitsas wrote favorably about candidates with whom he or his close friend and coauthor Jerome Armstrong had financial relationships. Moulitsas swore the charges were baseless (Armstrong, too, has denied impropriety), but they clearly got under his skin. When The New Republic's Web site published an e-mail from Moulitsas to a group of friendly activists urging them not to talk about Kosola and thus "starve it of oxygen," Moulitsas went berserk in a blog posting, accusing the venerable liberal journal of treason. By the weekend, Moulitsas's allies were sending each other e-mails infected with the paranoia of revolutionaries who've gained power too fast: How should they deal with traitors? How much openness could they handle? Which fellow travelers could they really trust?

So the more they react, the harder the media scrutinizes. The more rage they respond with, the more coverage they will get. Not positive coverage, either. This will not get prettier or easier for Kos. The real danger here is that if the media drags him down, they will be trying really hard to bring down all bloggers at the same time.

The knives are out. Ready for prime time?

At least we have ring girls now.

Blogosphere, Media | Gaius Sunday, 25 June , 2006

By TC@LeatherPenguin, Sunday, 25 June , 2006 @ 8:23 am

This is all too much fun. More Popcorn (in lieu of Cowbell)!
By Gaius, Sunday, 25 June , 2006 @ 8:26 am

I’m really worried about the collateral damage here. Only a small portion of the blogosphere is as nasty and angry, but we are all at risk of being dragged down.
By Crazy Politico, Sunday, 25 June , 2006 @ 10:22 am

I posted a week or so ago, an article called Kos the King Maker, and predicted that he’d start seeing this type of scrutiny.

Much like a Hollywood starlet, Kos will now find that fame brings publicity, but it’s not always the good type.
By Gaius, Sunday, 25 June , 2006 @ 10:29 am

The media microscope can be kind of rough.
By Black Jack, Sunday, 25 June , 2006 @ 12:17 pm

We’ll all have chicken and dumplins…

Yeah, dice are rolling and the knives are out, but not for anyone but Kos and Armstrong. They’ve gotten too big for their britches and the Democrat Party establishment isn’t going to let those two upstarts take over without a fight. Sure, MSM is part and parcel of the purge, but also has other fish to fry, and they’re likely to take a cheap shot at Blogs whenever the opportunity presents itself. That’s just in the nature of things, old dragons don’t yield to young lions without a scrap.

The liberal establishment wants to keep the cash contributions flowing from the Kos Kids, and in general wants to hold onto all the Moonbat votes they can, and to maintain good relations so their youth and energy can be mobilized during elections.

But, the establishment can’t allow the Netroosters to elbow moderates out of the party. Which is exactly what Kos and Armstrong intend, the Lieberman conundrum is instructive here and brings the problem into focus.

The Netroosters want Lieberman’s head as a symbol of their emerging power. If they get it, old line Dem moderates will depart for third party candidates, or sit out the midterms, and the establishment has the experience to know it. However, the young Netroosters are determined to purify the party, and elevate themselves in the process, they think they own the Democrat Party anyway. Didn’t they pay good money for it?

But like Howard Dean in 2004, the liberal establishment would rather throw a few rats overboard than see the ship go down for the third time.
By Dean Esmay, Monday, 26 June , 2006 @ 5:10 pm

Snotty, dismissive charges that blogs are typified by ranters and irresponsible hacks are a mainstay of the MSM and will continue to be. To a certain extent the charges are valid and to a certain extent they are not. It depends on which blog, when, and in what context. Nevertheless, let’s not overstate things: no one is going to be “dragged down” except maybe the shrillest voices at Daily Kos.
By Gaius, Monday, 26 June , 2006 @ 6:19 pm

Let’s hope, anyway.
By Urban2, Monday, 26 June , 2006 @ 7:30 pm

You wrote>>>”The real danger here is that if the media drags him down, they will be trying really hard to bring down all bloggers at the same time.”
I think this is an interesting but a mistaken take on the situation. I don’t see how the media can bring you down if they are not responsible for buiding you up. Kos is not a media phenomenon. One thing people miss about the republican success and democratic abject failure in the current dispensation in American politics can in a large part be seen in their respective attitude towards the media. The Republican see the media as just another hostile constituency, whose products are utilized when it serves your purpose and relentlessly attacked when their products goes against you position. And there is no downside to doing that. The Dem on the other hand assume the media’s professionalism and fairness going in to the point of thinking them part of te same constituency. This allows media pronoucements to assume more weight than it is worth in their positioning. What the left ‘netroots’ have figured out is to take a playbook from the Repub program sheet and try to utilize it for their purpose. So while the media niggling might be a temporary destraction for the kossacks, looking at the the landscape purely from a tactical political position, the future of the Dem party is going to increasely mirror their point of view, if for no other reason that the present democratic position will increasingly be a lossing one viv-a-viz the republicans.
By Gaius, Monday, 26 June , 2006 @ 7:42 pm

For the most part, the media is quite hostile to Republican and Conservative people. Since reporters are overwhelmingly Democrats, this is kind of a foregone conclusion.