Blog-rolling for votes and dollars

Jim Newberry, the Missouri lawyer running to boot Roy Blunt, doesn't think of blogs as an ATM. His Web operations are engineered by Stirling Newberry, who is Jim's cousin once removed and a veteran of blog-based politicking. Stirling Newberry was involved in one of the various Draft Clark campaigns, and he's a regular contributor to sites like Daily Kos and The Blogging of the President. Stirling has written extensively about his plans to turn Jim's run into the model of an "open campaign."

The Newberry "campaign is binding its various parts together by using new technologies and new ideas, and taking the best of what everyone is doing," Stirling wrote on MyDD.com, a popular blog. "The job of the campaign is to pull ideas in, and turn them into a unified message. It's Jim that is running for office, make no mistake about it, and he decides what the campaign is going to do. But, instead of trying to impose from the top down, he is trying to pull in from the center out."

These are high-minded ideas, and it's not clear whether Newberry will be able to stick with them through the campaign -- or, if he does stick with them, whether they'll lead to success. But Newberry's plan does seem a bit more solid than that of the many other candidates pitching themselves to blogs. It's true that Newberry's Boot Blunt ads don't look very different from the other candidates' spots, and it's not likely that many people will decide to give to Newberry just as a way to get rid of someone as forgettable as Roy Blunt. But the ads, Stirling Newberry says, are but one part of Jim's online campaign. Bloggers know that you keep a blog-audience engaged by writing frequently about a subject, and Stirling blogs frequently about Jim Newberry. The writing keeps the lefty blog audience in touch with the goings-on in the Newberry campaign, creating a rapport between the candidate and his far-flung supporters.

So far, the Newberry campaign has spent about $4,000 on its ads on blogs, and it has made back all of that money in donations. This pleased Stirling Newberry, because he was able to take the $4,000 to several national political organizations -- he won't say which ones -- as proof of Jim's appeal to voters. The national organizations in turn decided to pump $20,000 into the Newberry campaign; Stirling says that the campaign is on track to raise $50,000 by the end of June.

Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, pointed to Jim Newberry's campaign as the right way to woo blog readers to a campaign. It's true that Newberry is blanketing the blogs with ads -- but his campaign is doing so while also trying to build grassroots support among bloggers. Only candidates who do this, Moulitsas says, will see much success in their ads.

Moulitsas recently invited a handful of candidates to submit statements to his site as part of the selection of the DKos8 -- eight candidates to whom the Daily Kos community will direct its support in November. Many of the candidates who took part had extremely nice things to say about the readers of Daily Kos. Tony Knowles, a Democrat running for the Senate in Alaska, was particularly generous with his compliments: "I am flattered and honored that you have asked me to contribute to your blog," Knowles wrote to the readers of Daily Kos. "I have read so many excellent discussions here about our campaign. In fact, it was your blog that was discussing the nuances involved in this race way back in December of last year (and before)."

Knowles' kind words led some blog readers to become suspicious that the candidate was pandering to the blog audience. But as one reader pointed out, "What's wrong with that?" Every other constituency in America is pandered to -- maybe it's time candidates started paying attention to what happens on blogs. "His statement makes it obvious that he has either been following what has been going on here longer than most, or else is interested enough in us to do some research."

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