Four paragraphs from a long, but interesting article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312bwarner.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1To be a successful insurgent in 2008, a candidate probably needs a serious following online. The activists in the so-called Netroots, people who connect to politics primarily through MoveOn.org and the liberal blogs, will be even more populous and more motivated than in 2004, and while it's impossible to generalize, it seems that most of the Netroots are eager to find a candidate who isn't Hillary Clinton. Among the anti-Hillary contenders, Russ Feingold and Wesley Clark have the strongest constituencies online. But perhaps the most viable candidate who is making a strong bid to inherit Dean's activist base is John Edwards, who now directs an antipoverty center at the University of North Carolina. In the last year, Edwards's support among the Netroots appears to have surged as he has explored the world of blogging and podcasting, renounced his initial support for the Iraq war, campaigned for hotel workers in a union drive and railed against what he calls the "phony" culture of Washington. When I sat with him in a Chapel Hill cafe in January, Edwards, appearing more relaxed and confident than he did at any time during the 2004 campaign, told me that he now understood that specific policies weren't nearly as important in modern presidential politics as telegraphing a sense of conviction....
Nonetheless, there is still reason to think that the barrier that has historically insulated insider candidates from outsider challenges may yet be breached. The best illustration of this is Dean, who came closer to upending the nominating process than any insurgent candidate since Hart. In gaining enough momentum to become, at one point, the presumed nominee, Dean highlighted two critical changes in American politics in recent years. The first is the proliferation of a cable-TV news media that can, virtually overnight, transform an unknown candidate into a coast-to-coast sensation, neutralizing the value of expensive ads and direct-mail campaigns. The second, and probably more transformative, is the advent of the Web as a fund-raising and organizing tool, which, under the right circumstances, can go a long way toward erasing a front-runner's advantage, especially if the insurgent manages to win one of the early primaries. "The fire wall is more vulnerable now," Susan Estrich says. If Clinton should falter in Iowa or New Hampshire, "whoever beats her won't have to put out buckets to collect cash. He'll have the Internet."
Because of these changes, the process of choosing a candidate is now more democratic, less predictable and harder for the party elite to control than it has been for 20 years. The question for a potential candidate like Mark Warner is just what kind of outsider he intends to be. The problem with Warner's theory of the race — that he can run, like Carter and Clinton, as a centrist, electable Southern governor — is that neither Carter nor Clinton had the misfortune of having to unseat a de facto nominee. They ran as outsiders pounding at the door of the party apparatus, but the weary party more or less invited them in. That won't happen in 2008. If Hillary Clinton does decide to run, the best Warner or any other rival can hope for is that this next election will be more like 1984, when Mondale, the insider, had to use every advantage at his disposal, including the superdelegates, to hold off Gary Hart's torrid attack on the interest groups that made up the Democratic establishment.
It's fine for Warner to say now that he doesn't need purists or populists, that he wants to run a campaign that is about what he's for rather than what he's against. But such aspirations are a luxury generally afforded to front-runners and fools, and Warner is neither. The party's more successful insurgents have all had one thing in common, whether they came from the left or center: each ran hard against the party machine itself. However much Warner may want to avoid this kind of populist appeal, recent history suggests that if you want to emerge as the alternative candidate in 2008, you probably have to be willing to harness and exploit the anger of Democrats who feel disconnected from the Washington establishment and who resent the idea that powerful insiders seem to be choosing a nominee for them. You have to be ready, as an earlier generation of Democrats would have put it, to take on the Man — even if the Man this time happens to be a woman.
The question here is, which potential "fallback" candidate can best telegraph
a sense of conviction. Edwards said it. Clark can do it. Feingold is doing it now.
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