(crossposted at Green Mountain Daily)
It's 2003, and the Democratic Party has 10 candidates in the running for the Presidential nomination. The earliest polls heavily favored Connecticut Senator and former Vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, considered a darling of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and the Senator who would prove to be a bigger, more uncritical supporter of the Iraq War than many Republicans - going so far as to repeatedly cast war critics in his own party as unpatriotic whiners.
But the polls were turning fast, and to the amazement of all, the unknown (and also centrist) candidate, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean vaulted into the lead, as well as onto the cover of every major newsmagazine in the country. Dean was propelled by a combination of disaffected liberals, moderates who had become angry about the war and the Democratic Party's wholesale impotence and indifference on the matter, and new voters who felt for the first time that the election mattered to them. This outsider wave to large extent took control of the campaign itself.
So threatened were the insiders by the developing political tsunami, that Dean's opponents had
to work together and engage in beltway dirty tricks in order to blunt his momentum, and Dean's media naivete and rapidly imploding professional campaign only made their job easier. Through it all, none spoke for the old guard more clearly and more forcefully than
Senator Lieberman himself:
Presidential contender Joe Lieberman warned Tuesday that rival Howard Dean, the hottest candidate in the field, could be "a ticket to nowhere" for Democrats in 2004 by advocating discredited Democratic policies on taxes and national security.
"A candidate who was opposed to the war against Saddam, who has called for the repeal of all of the Bush tax cuts, which would result in an increase in taxes on the middle class ... could lead the Democrat party into the political wilderness for a long time to come,"
The Traditional Media initially tried to pass off the Dean phenom as a fluke - a bunch of crazies temporarily riled up. A simple glitch in their collective narrative of American politics. After Dean did not bolt the Party as many predicted, and his supporters dutifully fell in line behind John Kerry's miserable run, some pundits even started referring to the Dean movement in a
positive light, given that it was now safely consigned (as they thought) into history and therefore rendered harmless and irrelevant to their own, beltway-tethered world.
But fast forward to 2006. Howard Dean is the DNC Chair and - to the chagrin of many - is pushing his 50-state strategy forward relentlessly. And it's Joe Lieberman who has been rejected by a record turnout of his own state Party and is bolting from the Democratic Party altogether. The right-wing Talking Heads are apoplectic, and the centrist types who pass as the "liberal media" (such as Cokie Roberts) are in a complete tailspin, mired in predictions of Democratic apocalypse, all because their own party has rejected the notion that insiders like them have a special right to dictate to the rank-and-file how they should vote and what's in their best interests.
At day's end, the traditional Media's attempts to marginalize the Lamont phenomenon worked decidedly against them. The relentless narrative was that the Lamont campaign was simply fueled by crazy bloggers - which was obviously untrue (try to imagine, for a moment, rank and file Dems sitting around a Connecticut bar talking about DailyKos). As others have observed, focusing on the blogosphere at all shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the new media. Sure, the lefty political blogs are abig part of it, but there is also Burlington's Democracy for America and True Majority, the mighty MoveOn.org, the media watchdog groups such as Crooks and Liars and Media Matters, journalism sites such as Raw Story - all leaderless, decentralized, and finally, after a couple years - truly grassroots (and I do not use that term lightly).
Still, the blogger narrative was everywhere (except in places like the New York Times, which had - and still today has, in their post-mortem editorial - the wherewithal to see reality), and since perception does have a tendency to become reality in politcs, the liberal blogosphere may have just had their clout bumped up quite a few notches as an unintended result.
In any event, the wave that began with a little, two-room office in Montpelier with Governor Dean, Kate O'Connor (who has now gone to "the dark side"), three interns (Abby Trebilcock and..er...I've forgotten yer names guys! - post in and remind me if you're reading!), Carolyn Dwyer doing some fundraising, and myself running in and out to buy and set-up their first 4 computers (I still have the Governor's Visa card number in my wallet as a memento) has officially hit the beach. How far it goes remains to be seen.