Angry in the Great White North

From the Weekly Standard:

[T]he Democratic party seems to be under the impression that bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A MAJOR MISCALCULATION, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters.

Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.

Obscene, relentlessly hostile, and crudely personal. Never seen that before, eh?

But while in Canada, blogging is still in the margins, even if left-wing styles (vicious and crude) and right-wing styles ("virtual op-ed columns") mimic the American example, in the United States, the Democratic Party is trying to ingratiate themselves with left-wing bloggers:

Yet the kowtowing continues. What makes the endeavor ridiculous is that Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers want substance: They don't want their rhetorical style aped--they want a politician to champion their far-left views. And yet the Democratic party has adopted the juvenile patois of the left-wing blogs without any corresponding shift in position, so they continue to pitch their woo in vain. These stylistic makeovers are transparent and therefore unsuccessful; the left-wing blog readers presumably see as clearly as anyone else that Harry Reid is an unconvincing firebrand, Ted Kennedy is not a credible champion of accountability, and Robert Byrd is a preposterous nominee for American hero.

What's worse is what happens when the politicians disappoint the left-wing bloggers. Then the viciousness is turned on them:

THE DICK DURBIN FIASCO of a few weeks ago provides a wonderful case in point. As is well known, on June 14 Senator Durbin compared the conditions at the Guantanamo detention center to what one could have seen in Nazi Germany or a Stalin-run gulag or while receiving the tender mercies of Pol Pot.

In the week that followed, it became apparent to the senator and his staff that he had made a terrible mistake.

Durbin offered an overwrought apology from the Senate floor.

For many of the bloggers who had supported Durbin through his ordeal, his apology occasioned a spasm of characteristically potty-mouthed outrage. Steve Gilliard suggested that Durbin "go fuck himself"; on the Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas concurred, observing that he agreed with Gilliard and added that "Durbin fucked up."

I can't recall any conservative blogger who vented his spleen in this manner at Stephen Harper while we all mused about his political future.

And is listening to the American version of rabble.ca working for the Democrats?

How has this strategy been working? Disastrously. The last six months have been a horror show for Republicans. And yet, astonishingly, the Democratic party has suffered more in the polls than the Republicans. According to a recent poll done by Democrats Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, 43 percent of Americans have warm feelings for the Republican party compared to 38 percent who feel the same way for Democrats.

Why is that? The Democratic party has decided to imitate the style of the political blogs, even though the most trafficked one, the Daily Kos, receives fewer than 600,000 visits a day.

While the traffic numbers of the Daily Kos are a great accomplishment, even 600,000 readers (a generous estimate) are nearly insignificant from a national electoral perspective. And while Kos's readers represent a constituency which prefers a steady diet of heated rhetoric and non-stop Bush bashing, there is nothing to suggest that a larger movement is developing with a similar taste for bare-knuckled, obscenity-laced politics.

The American blogosphere is far ahead of the Canadian counterpart, which gives us the opportunity to see the pitfalls. One is that as much as our writing seem to resonate with the fifty or hundred or thousand daily visitors we each might garner, that number means virtually no one in Canada reads what we write. Though it does not seem likely that our politicians will fall into the trap of thinking that conquering the blogosphere means conquering the electorate, as have the Democrats, we have to be equally cognizant of the fact that the politicians are not making any special effort to please bloggers, nor should they be trying. You might be viewed from time to time by an MP or a staffer, but don't let it go to your head.

On the other hand, it is noteworthy to distinguish the frenzied and furious left-wing blogger from the measured and calculating right-wing blogger. While the sound and fury of the left, the abuse and the name-calling, are good for entertainment value, it adds up to little of real value. The left wing politicians are ill-served by their blogging brethren. On the other hand, the "op-eds" of the right-wing, sprinkled with a modest amount of legitimate journalism, taken in measure, is far more helpful, providing talking points that the conservative politician can use to his benefit. Just remember, conservative bloggers, he's trying to get more than just your vote, and well he should. If it looks like he's trying to get just yours, for goodness sake, swallow your pride and set him right yourself.