It appears the elite bloggers secret has been discovered. In a recommended diary at Dailykos entitled Why has the Blogosphere Accepted Hillary?, David Mizner unlocks why we are apparently not sufficiently anti-Clinton:
But having read a good chunk of the blogospheric commentary on the primary, I know the main reason that a-listers are open to Hillary: they're afraid of the Right. To listen to a-listers is to believe that the Right is so powerful and masterful that we should nominate Hillary, because she and only she has the requisite toughness. Only she will hit back and hit first. Only she understands how to fight the Right. Stoller:
Democratic primary voters don't really have a choice, since Clinton's the only candidate who actually understands how crazy the right-wing really is.
Nailed us! That is it, precisely. Personally, as many commenters in that diary stated, I am also afraid of losing traffic, which is why five months ago I left a blog with over 27,000,000 visits during my tenure in order to start a blog with zero all time visits.
Being told that you am not doing enough to help out on the all-important issue / campaign X is simply an unavoidable condition of blogging. I wrote about this a couple years ago on a day when one D.C. staffers too many sent our a snotty email telling "us bloggers" what we should be writing about. At the time, I snapped, but since then I have come to accept it. However, in this case, I felt the need to speak out because of the hilarity of the argument presented. I mean, seriously, using Matt Stoller as an example of someone who has accepted Clinton, and isn’t sufficiently speaking out against her flaws? Seriously? Matt has actually appeared in a television commercial attacking Hillary Clinton, something which I think can be said of about ten people in the entire country this cycle:
So, what is the threshold for properly attacking Hillary Clinton, if appearing in a campaign commercial attacking her, by name, isn’t good enough? Perhaps it’s Matt’s fault, along with the rest of us elite bloggers, that Obama and Edwards also support residual troops in Iraq, and said nothing about their differences with Clinton on this subject for the first nine months of the campaign. Of course, both Obama and Edwards are attacking Clinton over residual forces now. Gee, I wonder how and why that happened? But I guess not only appearing in a campaign commercial attacking Clinton by name isn’t good enough, but apparently having other campaigns adopt your attacks against Hillary Clinton is good enough, either. Maybe we need to develop several independent narratives for this campaign in order to be sufficiently anti-Clinton.
Here is a selection of some other things Matt has written about Hillary Clinton recently:
--November 3: "I don't want Clinton to win. I really really don't."
--October 23: "Anti-Clinton Opportunity"
--: "Clinton might go all Kerry-esque with the 'I voted for the authorization not the war', since that's what she genuinely thinks, and I'm now going to vomit a little in my mouth. "
--October 12: "If anyone has illusions about how horrific Clinton will be as a President, disabuse yourself now."
--October 10:
Clinton believes that the top-down political model of her youth, of the early 1960s, can be resurrected. She cannot handle a political system where one party is acting in utter bad faith, and ultimately turns to bad faith herself. That's why she will not come out against torture by the CIA, since she cannot bring herself to believe that the government could do something so awful, that the Iraq invasion was done for no good reasons whatsoever. And so she ratifies the horrifying behavior, and will continue to do so as President.
--September 25: "Hillary Clinton's disgraceful statement on Iran, and her shameful statement ground zero, reveal just what kind of political leader she really is, and how she insults the character of this nation with her small-minded appeal to fear."
What a Clinton supporter that guy is! He really isn’t pointing out how "Hillary Clinton is too corporate, too hawkish, too Washington to be a good nominee." Apparently, Stoller hasn’t achieved the final level of anti-Hillary mater purity, where he starts to glow, ala the Last Dragon. And Matt should be handing out ponies to people who oppose Clinton, too.
Even apart form Stoller, who is David Mizner referring to among these evil, "a-list" sucks-ups to Hillary Clinton? He has singled me out on a few occasions, once claiming that I am not sufficiently anti-Clinton is because I am afraid of offending Peter Daou:
And unlike you, Chris, I don't care if Peter Daou gives me a mean look at Yearly Kos
From what I can tell, Mizer actually thinks this about pretty much all bloggers, not just me. Check out these several quotes where he suggests a blogger conspiracy to not endorse. Seriously, it is a conspiracy, man:
Bloggers are among the most high-info, high-intensity voters yet less than only five or six of what? 100 A-list bloggers have endorsed a candidate. That can't be a coincidence.
Also, we bloggers are a bunch of fakes:
I'm sure that some of the blogger are sincerely uncomitted. Other are just pretending to be uncommitted.
And he thinks that Atrios is a gutless suck up:
And as I said somewhere in this thread, I think their reluctance to take sides reflect the fact that they're pretty big people, some of them, within the Democratic Party. If, say, Atrios endorsed Obama, he would face a lot of flack from people he works with and meets with.
All bloggers are compromised:
I could be wrong but I think a lot of the big bloggers, being part of the Democratic Party apparatus, will remain neutral till the end.
Bloggers have a weird role: their part party people, part independent journalists. Do these two roles conflict?
Kos was hiding things from us for months:
Maybe Kos is. I have the feeling that they might support a candidate but don't want to say so.
He really isn’t kidding about what he thinks of bloggers:
Especially those who want to remain in good graces of all factions within the party.
It's also a matter of readership, as I said.
In case the previous quotes weren’t explicit enough:
But my feeling is, they have opinions that they're keeping secret for fear of offending people--that's very un-blog, if you ask me.
Even more:
As I said, most political junkies have a candidate at this point, they just do. Or at least lean one way, and let people know which way they're leaning.
I don't think it's a coincidence that exactly one blogger I can think of supports a candidate.
Mizner has also has some choice words for Oliver Willis, Miss Laura and David Sirota in two past threads that were much the same as his one today (here and here). Apparently, "we" means pretty much anyone with a blog that gets more than 100 visits a day, and unless he says otherwise we are all gutless suck-ups to the powers that be, and as such afraid to endorse in primaries Which is I guess why we just finished off our second $100K fundraising in two months for a Democrat in a contested primary, this time against an incumbent. And the Blue Majority and Blue America pages are completely void of Democrats in contested primaries or those running primary challenges against incumbents.
(It is interesting that among all the bloggers Mizner names, he never names Jerome Armstrong, Jonathan Singer, or Todd Beeton in his attacks, even though they almost never attack Clinton. Could it be because Mizner is afraid of losing his occasional writing gig on MyDD were he to directly attack the people who gave it to him? But I digress...)
Really, I don’t know what Mizner’s problem is. I don’t even really know what he wants, since he offers no suggestions on further, more severe anti-Clinton activities we should undertake. I’ve looked to his past diaries for guidance on this matter, and I get contradictory advice like "[b]logs shouldn't try to force consensus," on the primary but, then, in the next sentence, apparently we "elites" must all line up in an anti-Hillary consensus because "make no mistake, to remain neutral, whether you're a union or a progressive blog, is to help Hillary." I honestly have no idea what he is looking for, or what further level of anti-Clinton activity we are supposed to undertake. I am not going to try to read into his motives or feelings behind all of this, because unlike Mizner and many other people in that thread, I don’t believe I can read other people’s minds.
Personally, I also don’t believe in blaming vague strawmen for a problem of mine without offering specific complaints on what they are doing, and specific recommendations on what they can do better. Whenever I see that sort of vague lashing out at an elite blogosphere strawman that didn’t so enough of "something" to prevent / cause X, it just reads like one more episode of "give me a fucking pony, blogosphere," that led to my rant last June. I honestly can’t remember any political issue, and any political fight, where I wasn’t accused by a significant number of people of not doing "something" more to help out (well, maybe during the final three weeks of the 2006 elections no one yelled at me for not doing more, but that is about it). It gets old, you develop a skin for it, and you start to dismiss it all. In fact, the contrarian in me actually digs in whenever people criticize me in such baseless, vague terms without offering any solutions whatsoever.
If there are people out there who honestly believe that us "a-list" bloggers aren’t doing enough to support your cause, please, at least bother to tell us what we think we are doing wrong and what we should be doing instead. And here is a tip: if you want to lobby someone to join your cause, don’t start your lobbying by throwing conspiracy theories at someone that distort their record and impugn their integrity. I really love working with people who publicly accuse me of having some sort of hidden agenda.
I don’t have any ponies to give out, and I’m not going to apologize to you or change my ways when I don’t even know exactly what I am being accused of or what you want me to do. Successful politics isn’t a vague accusation of conspiratorial behavior. It requires brainstorming, strategizing, research, and organizing. All of that went into, for example, the seven months I have spent working on the residual force issue. I didn’t just flip some switch and then "poof" it was the lead story for a debate six weeks ago. A lot of people worked on that for a long time to even push the issue that far. And it will take a lot of work--a lot of very specific work--to do something like that again. But I am always open to actual suggestions on how to move the campaign in a progressive direction.