Moron Kos VegasRyan Lizza gives his
thoughts on the event. It's amusing because obviously the bloggers want to be wooed, and yet they're wary of "selling out".
And then the whole effort seems to backfire, exposing exactly the new rifts that are on display all weekend--the establishment versus the rank-and-file bloggers; the partisans versus the ideologues. While meeting with a group of bloggers, Warner is confronted by one Edward Anderson, who forces him to fess up to the $50,000 party tab. "We don't want to join the consultant class," he scolds Warner. On the blogs, the debate over the Stratosphere bash turns into an opportunity to attack Warner for his views on Iraq and Iran and his association with the DLC. "[A]ll I saw at the Stratosphere was an old-fashioned politician spending something like $70,000"--the number somehow keeps rising--"on a garish party to soften up a constituency," Micah Sifry writes on Personal Democracy Forum. "If I'm gonna settle for a DLC, I'm going to settle for Hillary," a Kos commenter spits. (Clinton, who chose not to attend, is no doubt enjoying this effortless measure of success.) Moulitsas tried to suppress the uprising with a front-page defense of Warner that only angered his troops even more.This gets into a topic that I've been dancing around the edges of. Instapundit noted the other day that Kos seems to be angling to the center. This in itself is not all that surprising. He's obviously aware of the millstone around his neck of 0-20 or so with candidates he's endorsed. Obviously the way to improve that record is to start endorsing some more moderate candidates, like James Webb of Virginia.
But the problem is that the followers may not be willing to follow. You know how it is, it's easy to lead a parade when everybody's going in the same direction, but the minute you try to make a sudden turn there are a lot of people who are going to ignore you and continue marching straight down the road. Lizza notes that Kos' coauthor of Crashing the Gates, Jerome Armstrong, is now working for Mark Warner.
Lizza misses the obvious here though:
There is no single issue that binds them together, and they have no discernable agenda.Their agenda is fighting the Republicans and being anti-Bush is the single issue that binds them together.
Overall it's an interesting article though, one that splits the difference between the triumphalism of the lefty blogs and the amused cynicism of Byron York or Hot Air's mystery attendee. Lizza of course represents the DLC agenda that the lefty bloggers despise, but he's closer to them than to the Republicans at the same time.
