The coverage of Markos and Daily Kos continues today with a profile from Newsweek and a brutal takedown by David Brooks (Times Select). Brooks piece is obvious payback for a series of relentless diaries Armando posted throughout 2005 that highlighted the fatuous and asinine and lazy tendencies of Brooks’s writing. Nowhere is this more obvious when Brooks calls Markos “Tom DeLay’s moral doppelgänger”. The Newsweek article is much more interesting. What’s especially fascinating is how differently Daily Kos looks from the outside from how it looks from inside the blogging community.
By 2006, Daily Kos was drawing some 600,000 hits a day, and Moulitsas’s anger over the war—and the Dems’ failure to hold Bush accountable—had reached a fever pitch. Yet some Dems fear that Moulitsas’s popularity will pull the party so far to the left that it won’t be able to win the general election in 2008. “It’s a little bit like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with these guys,” said an aide to a Democratic presidential candidate who asked not to be identified while the boss was angling for Moulitsas’s support. “You like what they’re saying when they’re coming in, but you don’t know what they’re going to do once you let them into your house.”
As presidential hopefuls worry that Daily Kos will pull the party to the left, the blogworld is more concerned that Daily Kos is eschewing any effort to push the party in any particular direction at all. Markos’s mantra, “I’m all about winning” doesn’t translate very well with the left-wing blogosphere’s audience, which is politically active, ideological, and decidely progressive. Even as Markos touts “people-powered politics” he ignores the implications and possibilities of a Democratic Party that is less beholden to corporate donors and traditional power brokers. If we would like universal health care we need candidates that aren’t afraid of the HMO’s, if we want more affordable prescription drugs we need candidates that are not reliant on the pharmaceutical industry’s donations. If we want a smaller, smarter, less expensive military, we need candidates that are not intimidated by the arms industry. People-powered politics makes it possible to have unapologetically progressive candidates. And just as the blogosphere can provide financing and free media to for progressive candidates, it can counter the centrist blather that the corporate media defines as the confines of respectable political discourse. In short, we can reinvogorate the left in this country, as any truly people-based revolution should attempt to do.
So, it is a bit jarring to see Newsweek suggest that the problem with Daily Kos is that it is threatening to pull the party too far to the left, and then to see David Brooks write something like this:
…the truth is that the new boss (Kos) is little different from the old boss- only smaller. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and many other Democratics bow and scrape. He has managed to spread the gospel of Kossism far and wide, which is not really about ideas and philosophy. “I’m just all about winning,” he has said…He has challenged his enemy and become it.
So, which is it? Is Markos a progressive force, looking to move politics to the left, or is a fully co-opted sell-out, with no more interest than winning a majority? And more importantly, which possibility presents a bigger threat to the Democratic Party and the progressive blogosphere?
The reality is (are you listening Newsweek?) that Markos is not going to push the party to the left, and therefore, you have no need to be uncomfortable on his account. But, the people-powered politics he has helped to unleash is going to push the party and the nation and the media to the left, whether Markos wants to come along for the ride, or not.
And when things move to the left (up to a point), it is the people that benefit.
