While I am not as fanatically attuned to the blogosphere as many Kossacks are, I am more attuned to it than most of my friends, and when we discuss the media coverage of the political scene this year, I inevitably cite the three people who have become, in my opinion, the Big Stars To Emerge in the political media -- Chuck Todd, Nate Silver and Al Giordano.
Up until a few days ago, Giordano's blog, The Field, was seen at RuralVotes.com. They have parted ways. The story of how Giordano and Rural Votes broke is one that is not particularly unique -- it's as old as journalism itself. But the story here is not only the battle between Publisher With Something To Lose and Upstart Journalist, but the battle Progressives, Liberals, Democrats -- whatever you want to call us -- have with our own history.
We learn from the ever-trusty Wikipedia that Al Giordano has been involved in progressive politics since he was a teenager, testifying in his state legislature against nuclear power...
He was arrested for what would be the first of twenty-seven times on May 1st, 1977. When he was twenty and living in a cabin in Rowe, Massachusetts, running the Rowe Nuclear Conversion Campaign, which ended in the first-ever shutdown of an operating nuclear power plant in America, he met Abbie Hoffman, who called him "the best political organizer of his generation." The two worked together until Hoffman's death in 1989, opposing U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and fighting to save the Delaware and St. Lawrence rivers.
A few years ago, he started Narconews.com, a site dedicated to the coverage of the drug wars, with a fairly clear sympathy for the drug side of the war. So clearly we have someone with solid progressive -- even radical -- credentials.
Early this year, he started covering the Democratic primaries on a blog called The Field, which was housed on a site called RuralVotes.com.
With a generous boost from links from established bloggers who liked what he wrote -- I discovered him first through a link from James Wolcott -- Al quickly established himself as one of the best interpreters of the current political zeitgeist on the Web. He just seemed to catch on a little faster than most everyone else what each new turn in the road meant. And so in a matter of a few months, he established his own following.
I have no idea what the statistics are, but I would imagine that this following exploded Rural Votes page view numbers. I had never heard of Rural Votes until I followed the link from Wolcott, and I have looked at the blogrolls on most of the major blogs, and I don't see RV linked on any of them.
Now, who is Rural Votes.com? This is the message you read on their front page:
RuralVotes is dedicated to energizing and building a solid rural constituency, promoting initiatives and ideas supporting the revitalization of rural America. Much of our nation's wealth and many of our greatest leaders are products of rural America. But lack of foresight in public policy has resulted in less opportunity, lower real wages and a lack of economic growth in many rural communities.
The places and faces of rural America are changing. An increasingly diverse population calls rural America home. 55 million rural Americans live on 80 percent of the land in the United States. Rich in natural resources, rural citizens share core values of community, hard work, family and faith. It's all about moving forward, and striking a balance between preserving valued tradition and making progress.
RuralVotes is working hard for a more vibrant rural America. Join us.
Okay, if you're like me, your eyes started to glaze over at about the tenth word. Now they may be a very effective site, and for all I know, they may have made a great deal of progress in realizing their mission. I'm not exactly locked into the issues of Rural America. But the tone of the entire site is very mainstream, respectable and inoffensive -- quite different from the sharp, often irreverent style and radical history of Al Giordano. This is a relationship that was not likely to last long.
Last week, without explanation, The Field was no longer found on Rural Votes.com. The blog is gone, the archive is gone. In fact, as of this writing, the first item on the list of recent articles is a link to a Field post, that now links to this message:
The Field is under construction!
The Field page you have requested is currently unavailable. You have been re-directed to The Back Forty
I love the little exclamation point. It's very upbeat.
So what happened? Al wrote this blog entry -- The piece is basically a reflection on a question that has been heavily hashed over in the last few weeks -- how the heck did Obama trounce such a deeply entrenched political regime like Hillary Clinton's? Al dismisses the people who say it was all about Obama's Internet penetration -- after all, it didn't put Howard Dean in the presidency in 2004 -- and suggests that the real reason for Obama's victory were the lessons he learned as a community organizer.
While its certain that Internet and technology in general have provided the networking and communications tools that made such massive self-organization so rapid the difference between the Obama campaign and all others before it comes down, for me, to a more human factor: that the candidate has studied, practiced and believes in community organizing.
Nothing too radical there. But where it turns is that Al follows this observation by quoting Saul Alinsky's list of 13 Rules for Radicals.
Okay, who is Saul Alinsky? Thank you, Wikipedia... (I'm not a journalist, okay?)
Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909, Chicago, Illinois - June 12, 1972, Carmel, California) is generally considered the father of community organizing...
In the 1930s, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago... He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood, which trained leftist organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In Rules for Radicals... he addressed the 1960s generation of leftist radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power...
Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for the grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s. Later in his life he encouraged stockholders in public corporations to lend their votes to "proxies", who would vote at annual stockholders meetings in favor of social justice...
Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice...
In short, he was a '60s radical.
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern liberalism is its failure and mortal fear of embracing the historic progressive and radical movements of the 20th century, particularly in the '60s. Liberals have permitted reactionaries to rewrite the '60s as a time when civilized American culture was threatened by violent, drug-fueled radicals who wanted to poison their sons with LSD and their daughters with sperm. All of the positive aspects of the counter-culture and protest movements are sweepingly dismissed and replaced only with images of its worst excesses.
And swept away with Kent State, Altamont and the Chicago Seven were Salvador Allende,Woodstock and Phil Ochs...
... not to mention Saul Alinsky.
You know, the people we now call Dirty Fucking Hippies.
Mainstream liberals and conventional Democrats are deathly afraid of rousing the memories of their progressive past, mostly because they blame them for losing the elections of 1968 and 1972, and they've been tiptoeing around their own ideals ever since. So when Al reran Alinsky's 13 Rules for Radicals, the proprietress of Rural Votes freaked, as detailed in this correspondence:
From: DebbySKoz@cs.com
To: narconews@gmail.com
Date: Wed, June 11, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.
Subject: What Are You Doing?
Rules for radicals? Give me a break. We have a meeting with Farm Aid and other interested parties in the next two weeks -- what do you think you are doing? This is not helpful -- do you WANT Barack Obama to lose? Talk about creating the petrii dish for beautiful loser syndrome. I am including Matt in this conversation b/c w/o an understanding The Field goes fallow. I mean it, Al. I cannot allow you to rule this roost to the detriment of the overall mission. I'll take the hit if you refuse to be a team player and quit. An Obama funder I have been courting is horrified. That makes three -- two in the last week. You are wrong headed. This has NOTHING to do with rural at all and this particular hero of yours according to Time Magazine in 1970 -- "SAUL ALINSKY has possibly antagonized more people—regardless of race, color or creed—than any other living American."
It is NOT 1970, it is 2008 I am NOT ARMING A REVOLUTION. I have now LOST two major funders this week alone and I have defended you to the hilt -- so what do you do? You go purposefully more left and i was blinsided by a phone call b/c I hadn't seen it. The ultimate lack of respect. I am uninterested in the defense of Saul Alinsky and his worthiness -- we are not a debating society ... it doesn't matter what you think is right or wrong headed -- it is what it is -- and funders are running away as will the Obama campaign -- who has informed me it wants nothing to do with this sort of propaganda. How could you? How could you? This is NOT rainmaking, it is a destructo force tornado. And for what?
Do you have a reasonable solution? As for The Field, without a reasonable agreement it goes dark and is archived with a big thank you to the readers for their participation. End of story. The next move is yours.
It's all there -- all of the misguided, uninformed, brow-beaten shame and fear of our own progressive history.
And what exactly were those 13 Rules that so shocked and appalled and frightened and panicked Rural Votes.com?
1 ) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2 ) Never go outside the experience of your people. It may result in confusion, fear and retreat.
3 ) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.
4 ) Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules.
5 ) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6 ) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7 ) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8 ) Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9 ) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10 ) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11 ) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into it's counterside.
12 ) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13 ) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.
Now please point out to me anything on that list that you would not find in Karl Rove's Little Red Playbook.
In any case, RV fired Al, so he took The Field to his own Narconews.com, to whom all good progressive bloggers are now switching their blogroll links -- and I urge all of you to add him to or change your bookmarks accordingly.
But this entire incident is an excellent case study for all those who believe that the mere presence of the Internet represents an explosion of all the old Conventional Media. Clearly, Internet publishers can be just as cowardly and craven as print publishers, just as there exist print publishers as brave as the best of the Internet publishers. The Internet is just another medium. It is in itself no more revolutionary than an Underwood typewriter.
However, what the Internet does offer is unprecedented options. In the old days, Al Giordano would get fired and have nowhere to take his work. Now he just transfers his column elsewhere with barely a blip.