Jerome Armstrong, who runs the popular left-leaning blog MyDD.com, is 40 years old, and for much of his life he followed politics only "on the periphery," he says. Only in the last few years has he come to see both the necessity and the excitement of civic participation, and in that short time he's taken to the game with all the gusto of a natural. Armstrong was an early fan of Howard Dean, and Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, was an early fan of Armstrong's blog; the match was eventually consummated in Burlington, Vt., where, during Dean's rise and fall, Armstrong decamped to work for the campaign. Now Armstrong is a full-fledged political consultant; he and Moulitsas have set up a firm to advise politicians on how to use the Web to outmaneuver their opponents, much as Armstrong (and many others) helped Dean to do in his campaign.

Armstrong's interest in Web campaigns is genuine, and given his background with Dean, he is just as qualified, if not more so, as any veteran consultant to advise a candidate looking for online expertise. But Armstrong has educated himself in much more than the mechanics of Web campaigns. Like Moulitsas, he's a political polymath, the kind of guy who can recite every competitive House race this year, and if you've got time he may well tell you the various candidates' fundraising records, his support in the party, and recent polling data for his race. "I've been looking at the House races for about the last three or four days," he said on Thursday, launching into a detailed discussion of the Democratic Party's chances of regaining control of the chamber in November. "It looks really close -- if the whole thing goes like 3 percent toward the Democrats, they could win like 20 seats." (That's just his top-line estimate; see here and here for a much, much more in-depth analysis.)

Armstrong's House forecast is based on polling data he's culled from news sources all over the Web, and fundraising data he got from the Federal Election Commission's Web site. "What I've been doing is, I've been looking at where the Republican attack money is going," Armstrong says. "Like I've been looking into how the Republican leadership PACs are distributing money, which House races they're targeting -- that way you see which races are competitive." Four years ago, it may have been possible to collect this data, but it would have been more difficult than it is today, and, anyway, without the distribution platform of blogs, doing this kind of research would have been pointless then.

"Ten years ago you'd have to go down to the FEC and get their filings and put it all in a big book and bring it back," Armstrong notes. "Maybe like 100 people in the country would have seen it. This year, here I am just a blogger getting this stuff, and since I've got the time and the resources I can look into this."

Moulitsas concurs; on the Web, it's springtime for number crunchers. "I've always been a political junkie," he says. "But never before like this -- there's no way I could have kept up with a Senate race in South Dakota, or a House race in Nevada, it just was not possible. Now, every newspaper's online, and with Google News I can have all this stuff e-mailed to me when news happens. I've set up all sorts of keywords; I'm always getting all this stuff. It's a whole different environment."

In the grand scheme of technological progress, increased access by bloggers to political information isn't the most astounding development. Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor who runs the popular, right-ish blog Instapundit, notes that "if you look at a more general picture of the world recently, the difference between amateurs and professionals has vanished in a whole lot of ways. For instance, look at music -- it used to be you only knew about studio stuff if you were a serious musician; the amateur would never know about it. But now you can set these things up at home. The insider tricks aren't insider tricks anymore, now that outsiders have access to the knowledge." A similar thing has occurred in film and photography with the advent of digital imaging, or in journalism with the advent of the Web and of blogs themselves. Why should political strategy be any different?

The Web's metamorphosis into a haven for armchair strategists seems all the more natural when you consider the fetishization of political operatives that has increasingly become the obsession of all media covering modern elections. It's well established that there are not nearly as many stories about policy today as there are about campaigns and the personalities who people them. John Kerry's capacity to run a presidential campaign is deemed at least as important as his capacity to, you know, run the country. The success of the DA Pennebaker film "The War Room," and "K Street," and especially "The West Wing," a TV show created by a political junkie as a gift to the rest of us afflicted with the bug, just underlines the point. One of the hottest video games in recent months has been "The Political Machine," which is no doubt the first game ever to feature as its primary villain the vexing mathematics of the Electoral College. And finally, for proof that we are ever more concerned about the horse race rather than the issues of the presidential race, look no further than the talking heads on cable news, constantly plumbing the depths of a sole overarching political-strategy story line, "What should Candidate X do next?"

The amateurs playing politics online often come off smarter than those on TV, and you can interact with them, which makes playing the game fun. Because they are now actually involved in assisting political campaigns, it wouldn't be correct to include Moulitsas and Armstrong in this group of "amateurs." But they're definitely not professionals in the mold of the veteran experts advising either of the presidential campaigns or the political parties, and certainly their readers -- who are apprised of much of the information that they collect -- are amateurs. In this sense, what we're seeing in this election cycle is truly novel; amateurs, the political junkies whose interest in politics used to go unfulfilled, now find themselves holding some of the mightiest data in politics, the kind of dish they used to drool over.

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