How the Internet turned everyone into James Carville

It would be a bit too credulous to conclude that these developments will prove to be a boon to political campaigns and, more pressingly, to the quality of American politics. So far, bloggers and the readers of blogs have been most influential to campaigns through fundraising -- especially for Dean, Kerry, Bush and many congressional candidates -- and, in a few instances, they've affected the news cycle, most recently in their flogging of CBS News' now-discredited Bush National Guard memos. In the Dean campaign, Trippi and other advisors professed to rely on the readers of the official Howard Dean blog for at least some strategic advice; we'll never know if this advice ultimately helped Dean, propelling him to a position that he never would have attained without help from the bloggers, or whether, in the end, the cultish Deaniac movement drove people away from Dean and did in his candidacy.

There is no easy way to measure the "quality" of the political strategy generated on the Web in the comments section of sites like MyDD or DailyKos. "It's all over the map," notes John Judis, the New Republic editor whose last book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," written with the political analyst Ruy Teixeira, serves as the basis for the popular blog Donkey Rising. "It's just like in sports. Who's to say what's a good idea and what's not?" But Judis also believes that much of the strategy offered up by denizens of lefty blogs is earnest, "flowing from a genuine political commitment," and is not out of the "the sheer pursuit of consultancy as an abstract skill"; as such, he says, it wouldn't hurt political campaigns to monitor some of what's going on online.

There is evidence that this is occurring, as witnessed by Zackpunk's ownership speech. But even if the blog audience does not serve up fresh strategic advice every day, it's at least useful to look at what the people online are saying if you're trying to attract them to your campaign, says Stirling Newberry, who blogs at the Blogging of the President.

"People are expert consumers, and it's much easier to find out what people really think about something like a consumer product if you observe them," Newberry says. If you go to a fan site devoted to motorcycles, you'll find out what's on the minds of potential motorcycle consumers. Likewise, if you go to a site devoted to politics, you'll find out what's bothering potential consumers of a political message -- and you'll discover their problems even if their specific ideas or suggestions for improving that product aren't very astute. "People really talk about the things they're worried about," Newberry says. "A lot of people say that by watching these sites Kerry should have known that Swift Boats were going to be very important -- he should have done something."

One problem with amateurs holding the tools of professionals, though, is that they may not quite understand how to use them. During the past few weeks, there's been a spirited discussion between some bloggers over how to interpret and account for the volatility in some presidential campaign polls, especially a recent Gallup poll showing a huge Bush lead. Ruy Teixeira, the polling expert of Donkey Rising, has argued convincingly that the Gallup poll is off because it oversampled Republicans in its calculation of voters "likely" to cast a ballot in November; Mickey Kaus, the resident blogger at Slate, called that thesis nonsense, and offered just as convincing a theory to support Gallup's numbers.

Such a fight, let's note, is unlikely to have come up four years ago; then, we didn't have as many polls with which to compare one single aberrant poll, and far fewer people were interested in the mechanics of polling. We've now got inside access to dozens of polls and sites that collect and analyze polls, from the indispensable Electoral-Vote.com to PollingReport.com to Real Clear Politics to Donkey Rising; if you're a politics junkie online these days, you likely consume at least a half-dozen new polls for breakfast each morning.

But what's an amateur to do in the case of a real question about the proper way to use these new tools? Maybe there is a place online for real experts, people who specialize in such previously cloistered fields as opinion polling. Online, you sometimes see some very bitter, partisan fights over polls, with no small number of people charging that certain surveys are rigged. Looking over this world recently, Mark Blumenthal, a veteran Democratic political consultant and pollster, decided that his professional voice needed to be added to the mix. He didn't blame the amateurs for their occasional ignorance about polling; it's not their fault, he says, that his industry hasn't engaged with the people online. But now, he says, it's time for that collaboration. "My sense is there is a role for a source of information about polling -- there's all this talk about manipulation, a conspiracy of the right or the left. Meanwhile, there's a community of social scientists who deeply care about how to draw a random sample, about getting things right. And the two groups aren't really talking to each other."

The best way to get the two sides talking to each other, Blumenthal recognized, would be by starting a blog of his own to discuss the ins and outs of polls. That's what he did last week with a site he calls Mystery Pollster; on his first day, Blumenthal got a link from Mickey Kaus and 15,000 page views. Blumenthal says he wants the site to serve as a bridge between the professional political consultants and the amateurs who populate the Web, and judging by the comments people have left him so far, he says that may happen. "It's an experiment," he says of the project, "a six-week experiment, and then we'll see what happens. It sure does look like it's going to take up all my spare time until then."

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