At Vegas blog-fest, it's not politics as usual

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FIRST READ

It's McCain versus the Clintons

Who will Kos support?
Which 2008 candidate will the Kos universe back? Will next year’s Kos convention -- which Vilsack said will be "hopefully in Des Moines" -- amount to the first primary of the 2008 race?
Warner is working hard and spending lot of money to woo the Kos universe. “Let’s keep dating!” Warner joked as he ended his speech Saturday.

But Rathband and others at Yearly Kos favor Al Gore. “My ‘08 candidate so far is Al Gore, absolutely Al,” Rathband said.

Another favorite of Kos-ites: Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. Ubiquitous throughout the Kos weekend as he cultivated the bloggers was Trevor Miller, an operative for Feingold's political action committee. (Feingold himself was giving speeches to Democrats in Wisconsin and Minnesota.)

If dissatisfied with the Democratic 2008 race, left-populist-progressives have the option – discussed at Yearly Kos this weekend -- of abandoning the Democratic nominee for a third-party candidate.

Making the rounds at Yearly Kos was former Howard Dean campaign operative Paul Blank, now running the Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign for the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
“If the Democrats don’t take a stand on those populist issues, there’s a third-party brewing in this country like we’ve never seen,” Blank said.

The Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign has anti-Hillary Clinton implications, since she once served on the company’s board. It’s no accident that Clinton is no favorite of the blogosphere.

Stoller of Mydd.com said that if Democrats don’t regain control of Congress this November, or if they do and fail to push a left-populist-progressive agenda, then conditions will ripen for a third party. “If a change does not happen, that pressure has to go somewhere,” he said. He predicted an economic crisis triggered by hurricanes, energy prices, conflict with Iran, and middle-class Americans hit by higher rates on their adjustable-rate mortgages.

“When that happens, that frustration is going to go somewhere,” he said, “A third party would be a standard path in American history to represent that frustration.”

Moulitsas acknowledged that many Americas don’t read the bloggers. The grocery-store cashier in Pueblo, Colorado may not own a laptop, much less be blogging for four hours a day.
“The Netroots will always have its limits,” he said in an interview with MSNBC.com. “It’s a ‘pull’ medium; only the people who really like that material are going to go read it. We’re a pull medium; we need more liberal ‘push’ media; we need liberal talk radio, we need a Fox News alternative in cable news…. Blogs aren’t the be-all, end-all.”

Moulitsas and other bloggers don’t bear superficial resemblance to traditional bosses such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Moulitsas told me, "I'm not a gatekeeper."

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But the bloggers seem confident that the party Establishment must heed them.

The traditional news media and Washington-driven politics are kaput, Moulitsas argues.
He scoffed at last week’s killing of al Qaida chief Zarqawi. “You can’t say, ‘the killing of Zarqawi will not make us safer,’ you can’t say things like that because reality and Washington D.C. do not mix,” Moulitsas said.

He told the cheering opening night crowd, “The media elites have failed us, the political elites, in both parties, have failed us. It’s our turn. If they refuse to reform, if they refuse to be accountable, if they refuse to join the people-powered movement as it seeks to make this a better country and move America forward, then they’ll be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

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