"The Hope of the Web" (Bill McKibben on Kos and Armstrong)

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18910

excerpt:

Since the Internet is a limitless virtual archive, it can quickly track down almost anything any journalist or politician has said and done in the last decade. Even when people try to make things disappear, someone in that huge throng of readers probably has a copy. When Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, helped lead the fight against Social Security privatization, he made good use of quotes from the reports in local newspapers of congressmen speaking to their constituents in small forums. He showed that pols were making reassuring statements to voters in their districts and then voting the other way on Capitol Hill. (He also helped track down photos of President Bush and Jack Abramoff.)

One testimony to the power of Daily Kos is the list of dignitaries who come to visit. Democratic superstars like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have posted diaries (and have gotten and have received criticism as well as praise). But the national attention it has been getting is not the most interesting part of the entire process. What is most striking is the way people are learning to use the technology to connect with on-the-ground reality. As mid-term elections approach, with the Republicans weakened for the first time in at least twelve years, the diaries on the Web increasingly become vehicles for raising money or recruiting volunteers. People post accounts of their efforts to revitalize local Democratic precinct headquarters and offer each other tips on how to build mailing lists. In some places, the party machinery has simply rusted away from years of neglect, even as the GOP, thanks to such strategists as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, has spent decades building an efficient vote-getting machine.

The Democratic Party organization has spent more than a generation coasting on the momentum it built up in the 1960s and early 1970s, and that momentum has been running out. But the Web sites linked to Daily Kos and their millions of users have been giving the Democrats a new charge. It would be premature to ascribe strong electoral power on a national level to these new voices—many millions of voters have never heard of them. But what seems most striking about the ever-louder Internet voices associated with Kos is that they share a strong desire to win, and new means to make that desire matter.

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