Blogging the Bloggers Panel at Take Back America

Isaiah Poole is MCing a panel with bloggers Chris Bowers, Jim Dean, Oliver Willis, Jane Hamsher, and Matt Stoller at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, D.C., so of course I'm blogging it.

Bowers opens with discussion of moving from blogging to activism. Prime example for him is running primary challenges (this conference is all about elections). He points to Lamont's challenge to Lieberman. Could have also pointed to 2008 challenges being organized at http://democrats.com

Other examples he lists: getting Gannon fired, blocking Bolton appointment, raising profile of Plame scandal.

Need an ongoing longterm campaign, he says, and to make a website the central hub with the best source of ongoing content.

Then you need as many other blogs as possible pointing to you and producing original content.

Every newsroom reads the progressive blogosphere, Bowers claims.

Googlebombing the campaigns (resulting in prefered sites showing up first in searches) worked well because of large numbers of blogs participating.

You need non-bloggers to buy in - from the corporate media and elsewhere. The don't do Fox debate campaign took off when Nevada Democratic party and national pundits took up the cause.

Dean, who runs Democracy for America, is not exactly a blogger, as far as I know. But he is a loyal Democrat and an online activist. He said his goal at DFA is developing leaders and moving them up the political food chain. (Of course, as we've seen in DFA, a club of people hoping to run for City Council someday does not always make the most effective organization of citizen activists able to demand justice now.)

Willis said the right is trying to copy Dailykos and Act Blue and the rest of the progressive blogosphere and thus far failing miserably, but likely to catch up. Willis thinks we're better at candidates and elections, but not doing as well with ideas and opinions. We need to explain to readers what research and ideas mean. He is giving the usual rap on the right wing food chain of think tanks and media outlets, but he's - as is typical - not focusing on creating a TV network, but rather on doing our blogging a little "better." If we do that, he thinks, "we" will take back the White House, and then the conservative movement will be dead. (But what will be alive?)

Hamsher started FireDogLake about 2.5 years ago. Now it's getting 80,000 - 100,000 visitors a day. The right will have trouble replicating what we do because we listen to readers and take feedback and input from them. We accepted that the Alito nomination could not be opposed, but our readers would not allow it. We ended up sending so many faxes that we took down E-fax. We formed the Blue America PAC and raised over a half million dollars for progressive candidates. Lamont campaign liberated other candidates to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Also, we've now reached the point where people will back a good candidate and back them again if they lose the first time.

Hamsher said the Libby trial should be compared to White Water, when people could just scream at their televisions and feel powerless. Now journalists cannot simply accept White House Spin. (Well, maybe not totally or always, but still quite a bit.)

Stoller sees certain public outrage with politics and media back to 1998, when people began arguing for leftwing ideas online. Re Fox News Debate: We sent 25,000 Emails to Tom Collins, the creepy Mormom and Chair of the Navada State Democratic Party. Robert Greenwald and Moveon did a video and petition. We started to bother Harry Reid and the Democratic presidential candidates. We convinced the candidates to drop out. The state party had no choice but to cancel the debate. Then the Congressional Black Caucus Institute announced Fox News debates. Color of change and black bloggers and again Robert Greenwald started pushing again. Candidates began dropping out. We empowered people. But people who say stupid things like "No, no, we have to go on Fox to reach out to people who disagree with us" - those are the people we disempowered." (Amen, brother.) And I would say the right wing blogs are failing not because their leaders don't listen to them but because their ideas and bad and have revealed them to be childish hypocritical sadistic perverts.

Poole raised question of money.

ENDS

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