'NY Times' Sunday Preview: Will Bloggers at Major Convention 'Get Real'?

By: E&P Staff An article in this Sunday?s New York Times Magazine titled ?Can Bloggers Get Real?? explores the upcoming YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas. Writer Matt Bai bills this as the ?first-ever corporeal assemblage? of a thousand bloggers and others associated with the most popular liberal Web site, DailyKos.com. Democratic luminaries such as Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, and a few possible presidential candidates, are expected to attend.

Bai himself will serve on a panel covering mainstream political journalism, which he likens to ?being the Dunkin? Donuts spokesman at a cardiologists? convention.?

Bloggers with pseudonyms?he mentions Georgia19 from Chicago--have suddenly becoming influential. Bai comments: ?In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternative society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm. It is not so much a blog as a travel destination?.?

Bai says the convention marks a unique opportunity for Democratic politicians,who are trying to get a grip on the blogosphere, to actually meet and greet the actual bloggers: ?Here , at last, is the impersonal ballroom with garish lighting and folding round tables, the throng of attendees whose hands can be shaken and shoulders gripped. Here is the Netroots as just another influential lobby to be wooed and won over, like the steelworkers or the Sierra club.?

While bloggers may reject this notion, Bai comments that ?the politicians may understand the real significance of this first bloggers convention of its kind better than some of the bloggers themselves, who imagine that cyberpolitics is no less than a reinvention of the public square, the harbinger of a radically different era in which politicians will connect to their constituents electronically and voters will organize in virtual communities.

?Politicians know that politics is, by its nature, a tactile business?.at the end of the day, partisans will inevitably be drawn to sit across the table from the candidate they support or oppose, just as votes will still be won and lost in banquet halls and airport hangars?.That?s because politics, like dating, is as much about the experience as it is about the winning or losing.?

Bai suggests that because of that ?this next iteration of American politics won?t really look so dissimilar from the ones that came before.? He also predicts that some of the bloggers will eventually run for office themselves. Those ?who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party?s insider establishment,? he concludes. ?They simply take its place.?