The Battle of the Blogs

Somehow I missed this article when it was new a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, The Daily Kos and My DD ended up on different sides of the Obama-Clinton divide, and things got ugly. Now that the race is over, I wonder if the battle will fade or if there is some more fundamental issue beneath the dispute.

I quit reading both of these sites when I gave up political blogging -- I just didn't need the drama of daily political commentary in my life -- so I missed the whole thing.

From The New Republic:

The Battle of the Blogs

As anybody with high-speed Internet knows, MyDD and Daily Kos sit at the top of the liberal Netroots movement, which over the last five years has made astonishing strides in its campaign to transform the Democratic Party into a hard-fighting, proudly liberal, and, most importantly, victorious entity. Though their websites offer distinct communities and commentaries, and though they have very different personalities, MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong (a former astrologer) and Kos's Markos Moulitsas (a former Army man) have always gotten along--the two co-authored a 2006 book, Crashing the Gate, about the rise of their movement. Their bond has been rooted mostly in common foes: Republicans, namby-pamby Democrats, the Iraq War, divisive "identity politics," and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. But the harmony that existed between MyDD and Kos since the birth of the Netroots no longer exists today, and a bitter internecine struggle within the progressive blogosphere is to blame. Just as bilious in tone as previous fights with Republicans or Joe Lieberman, it has revealed fault lines in the movement that will be tough to cover back up. There have been charges of misogyny and of bullying, and some longtime members have walked away from their cause altogether. And what's at the heart of it all is that most loaded of questions: Barack or Hillary?

The Netroots have been arguing about the 2008 campaign since the day after John Kerry lost, but the debate turned ugly when Armstrong revealed his vote in the February 12 Virginia primary. "In the end, what compelled me to vote for Clinton was looking at someone that seemed practical about the battle we have on our hands and looking ready to engage in the fight," Armstrong blogged that day. "I'd rather be part of the fight than be told to stay on the sidelines because I'm too partisan."

Armstrong had long voiced concerns that Obama's campaign was too personality-driven and too reliant on the votes of Independents and Republicans. But his official endorsement made readers go ballistic. "Voting for the DLC candidate makes you part of the fight? Come on," wrote one commenter. Another suggested, "If you aren't a part of her campaign, you really oughta try to sign up and get some of those $$$ while you can"--a dig at Armstrong's past campaign work for politicians like Howard Dean, Jon Corzine, and Mark Warner. A group of far nastier comments were deleted.

At Daily Kos, commenters were ripping Armstrong to shreds. One user wrote, "MyDD isn't even a pro-Clinton site these days. It's just a toxic waste dump dedicated to throwing slime at Obama and hoping it sticks. ... I know that Kos and Jerome are friends and partners, but it's perhaps time for Kos to reconsider linking to MyDD from the DK blogroll."

Clintonites and Obamabots were ferrying between the two sites, "recommending" posts sympathetic to their favored candidate (thus ensuring more prominent placement on the page), and brutally attacking one another in the comment sections. In late March, Armstrong, upset by name-calling between Clinton and Obama supporters on MyDD, barred new user accounts on the site for a week. The sense of betrayal among fellow Netrooters after his Clinton endorsement was palpable. Armstrong was backing a candidate who, as Chris Bowers, another leading lefty blogger, wrote on Open Left, hadn't fully rejected the DLC, hadn't opposed the Iraq war from the start, hadn't offered overwhelming support for Net Neutrality, and hadn't campaigned in small caucus states. That Bowers' list read like the table of contents of Crashing the Gate made Armstrong's endorsement sting even more.

The fight got even weirder in April, when the Huffington Post unearthed an audio recording of Clinton berating the Netroots at a closed-door fundraiser. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party," she said. "They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me." But Armstrong shrugged the incident off, just like he has shrugged off all the other harangues he has fielded the last couple months. "Anybody that's got a tape recorder can make news," he told me. "I don't really care about that quote." But what about the "citizen journalism" and "people-powered politics" he had spent years championing? "I tend to be contrarian," Armstrong said. "It's a trait that I have. Clinton has had plenty of bashing out there, and I think Obama gets way too much slack."

Read the rest of this article.

This whole thing isn't too surprising. The Obama-Clinton battle really divided the Democratic party in ways it hasn't seen since the sixties. So it makes sense that the Netroots element of the party would also be divided. Too bad.

As much as I liked Obama early on, and was torn over supporting Clinton, in the end the only real difference between the two is their personalities and a few minor details in policy.

What this really shows is how much emotion plays a role in our decisions, whether we want to admit it or not.

Tags: Battle of the Blogs, New Republic, MyDD, Daily Kos, politics, Netroots, Democrats, liberals, Obama, Clinton, psychology, Jerome Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas