One of the most fun things about hanging out here at dKos over the last year has been the experience of feeling like one is living just slightly in the future. If some issue, idea, or news story enters the media/cultural mainstream, the odds are pretty high that I'd already heard about it (and even sometimes fiercely argued about it) here on dKos first.
Time and time again, we've watched issues that we debated so furiously here (the role of the internet and blogs in campaigns, "electability," who is a "real Democrat," etc.) all end up as major talking points on Hardball, Crossfire, and the print media, sometimes in a matter of hours or days, though sometimes taking as much as a month or two. I'm not sure I want to argue that blogs like dKos (or Atrios or Calpundit or TPM) are driving the mainstream media narrative. Rather, it seems to me that we might operate more like a canary in a coalmine, finely tuned instruments picking up vibrations before they get loud enough for everyone to hear....
So while I am keenly aware of the dangers of the internet echo-chamber, and have expressed serious worries about it in the past (especially when the Dean triumphalism got too overbearing), given the way political reality seems to have eventually aligned to dKos prediction, what are we to make of the current chaos in Iowa?
Namely, it's long been a matter of consensus here that it's going to be a Dean vs. Clark race, even when the rest of the media had completely forgotten about Clark. And with Clark's recent, sudden rise in the polls it certainly looked like the race would be following the dKos template, just as expected. Now, though, things look much cloudier. What do we make of the late surges of Kerry and Edwards, both of whom we'd all (or most of us, anyway) written off months ago, and for whom there hasn't been any corresponding surge of support by Kossians? Is this a case of the self-selecting audience of weblog writers/readers (with all the demographic biases that entails) convincing ourselves that the real world genuinely reflects our own preconceptions, or should we have faith that the real world just needs to get its confusion out the way and will come to its dKos-reflecting senses eventually? My faith in our collective genius is being severely tested tonight.