I finally got a copy of Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. The book is of special interest to me because I sat down with Eric for forty-five minutes last year in an Austin, Texas hotel lobby to discuss the blogwars of the 2008 Democratic nominating season. The fruits of that interview can be found on pages 139, 151, 205-6, and 234.
First of all, I’d like to recommend this book to you even though I have some significant problems with it. If you’ve been around the blogosphere for any period of time, you’ll love the storytelling and the biographical information on some of the A-List bloggers. If you are new to the blogosphere, you’ll get a very informative history lesson. The book is at its strongest when it focuses on the positive achievements of the netroots movement and its relationship to the traditional media and the Democratic Party. So, trust me, there is plenty to enjoy.
However, the book is also a history of the overall 2008 campaign for the blogosphere’s point of view. From that standpoint, it has some pretty deep flaws. You can get a quick sense of this by checking ‘Jeremiah Wright’ in the index. You’ll see three mentions (on pages 114, 219, and 260). On page 114, Rev. Wright is only mentioned in the context of Sam Stein’s discovery of the Pastor John Hagee tapes.
Having seen the Jeremiah Wright story unfold during the previous weeks and watched as the same 5- or 10-second clip of Obama’s former pastor got looped over and over on cable television, Stein didn’t want to grab a snippet of Pastor Hagee’s sermon and then claim it captured the pastor’s whole message. So he set out to verify the Hagee tapes. He found the same online Hagee database that Wilson used and quickly searched out the Hitler sermon.
Boehlert just assumes we know who Jeremiah Wright was and how those looped clips influenced the contest. And he moves on.
On page 219, he mentions Wright only in passing as he discusses the credulity of right-wing bloggers.
Unable to spot the obvious telltale signs of an outlandish story, scores of prominent conservative bloggers got fooled into promoting a ‘bombshell” that “caused a political firestorm not seen since the Jeremiah Wright tapes,” as bloggers advertised it.
Again, it is assumed that we know something about the bombshell Jeremiah Wright tapes and their significance.
On page 260, Boehlert refers to Wright for the final time:
In March 2008, when Obama, spurred on by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, gave his speech about race in America, the 37-minute address became a YouTube sensation.
It is a remarkable achievement to write a book about the 2008 Democratic primaries and to only mention Wright three times (and in all three cases to have his mention be totally tangential to the point being made). But this is only a symptom of a larger blind-spot in the book. Nowhere is there any mention of Jack & Jill Politics, or Liza Sabater’s Culture Kitchen, or Oliver Willis, or Chris Rabb’s Afro-Netizen, or the Field Negro, or any other black bloggers or blogging communities.
In Chapter 8, The Blog War of 2008, Boehlert dedicates twenty-two pages to attacks that were made on Hillary Clinton, and four pages detailing attacks on Obama. In fairness, he did quote me within those four brief pages:
The suspicion online was that the [Geraldine] Ferraro comment was part of a coordinated strategy by the Clinton campaign to portray Obama as shady and urban, to “ghettoize” the candidate. “At a certain point you ask, ‘Why is this happening over and over again?'” the blogger, Obama booster, and former community organizer Martin Longman explained to me during the campaign. “The dog whistle never stopped. ‘Oh, he’s a Jesse Jackson Democrat.’ ‘Oh, he can’t win because he’s black.’ That’s bullshit. And at a certain point you’re like, when Jesse Helms did this stuff I flipped out, So why am I not going to flip out now?”
But, in Boehlert’s treatment, that side of story is simply overwhelmed by the Clinton side. It isn’t that I have too much complaint about how he treated the Clinton side. It’s clear that Boehlert feels that Clinton was treated shabbily and that Obama supporters lowered their standards of proof, fairness and media criticism. And, I admit as much in the book. The problem is one of balance.
Perhaps the problem arose because Boehlert’s blogosphere is dominated by A-List bloggers who, with the exception of Markos, are all white. While Markos gets prime treatment as an unapologetically pro-Obana anti-Clinton blogger, and I get some decent coverage, the only mentions of Al Giordano and Nate Silver in the book are the the supposedly eccentric names of their blogs: The Field and fivethirtyeight. But it was Al, Nate, and I (plus the freelance blogger PsiFighter37 who did the dirtywork of examining the delegates and superdelegate counts. We were the heralds telling everyone that Obama had won the race and that Hillary had no chance unless the superdelegates overthrew the will of the voters. As early as 1:09AM on the night of Super Tuesday (February 5th-6th), I had practically called the race:
I don’t see how Clinton can win the nomination now. I think she still has a chance…she didn’t get knocked out…but it’s now Obama’s race to lose. He’s got more money, he’s got more mojo, and Clinton doesn’t have any more Arkansas or New Yorks left on the schedule.
Obama went on to reel off twelve straight victories in a row before his momentum was slowed in Ohio and Texas.
