If you ask denizens of lefty blogs to explain the recent proliferation of political ads on the Web, most people will come back at you with some version of the story of Ben Chandler. In January, Chandler, a Democrat running in a special election for a House seat in Kentucky's 6th District, laid down $2,000 to purchase ads on about a dozen blogs. The move was a bit of a gamble; nobody knew if advertising to a blog audience would be useful, and Mark Nickolas, Chandler's campaign manager, said that he planned to pay for the ads out of his own salary if they failed to raise any money. But he needn't have worried -- in just two weeks, about $80,000 in donations came pouring in to the campaign through the blog ads. The money gave Chandler's campaign needed resources in the last phase of the race, and on Election Day, in the middle of February, Chandler emerged victorious.

For many political candidates, the Web has long been a mysterious beast, clearly powerful but also unpredictable, difficult, somewhat dangerous. This is especially true for local candidates -- if you're running for Congress, what do you do with the Web? Getting people to learn your name is hard enough -- how do you get people in your district to go to your site? None of this was obvious until Ben Chandler came along with his blog ads. His experience provided candidates with a kind of road map for Web success.

How do you get people to go to your site and to open their wallets for your campaign? You go to where the people are -- blogs -- and you convince them, the way Chandler did, of the rightness of your run. Sure, most of these people can't vote for you; if quizzed, many would probably know very little about what goes on in your part of the country. But Ben Chandler's ads persuaded the blog audience to care about a particular race in order to "send a message" to Washington. If you want to do right by the blogosphere, Chandler's success seemed to show, you should paint your race as a national cause.

This strategy is in full swing on the lefty blogs. For instance, an ad for Doug Haines, a Georgia Democrat running for a seat in the House, features the grimacing mug of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Obviously, Haines is not running against Ashcroft in November; his opponent in the race is Max Burns, the Republican incumbent in Haines' district. But nobody cares about Burns. It's Ashcroft's creepy grin that keeps Democrats up at night.

Bill Gluba, a Democrat running for the House in Iowa, asks you to "Help Defeat the Republican Who Cut Taxes $500 Billion ... for America's Wealthiest 1%." Is Gluba running against George W. Bush, the president who proposed and signed such tax cuts? No, the Republican in question is Jim Nussle, the faceless congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee. But "Defeat Jim Nussle" doesn't have much of a ring to it. Another ad currently on Daily Kos demands, "Kick the Beast in Its Belly!" Which beast is this? The Republican-controlled House? The Senate? When you look closely at the ad, it turns out that the menace isn't a problem for a large swath of the country -- the beast is the Texas Supreme Court, the all-Republican body to which David Van Os, the Democrat who placed the ad, wants to be elected.

Do such old-school campaigns work? Mike Byron's experience is instructive. At the end of May, Byron, a Democrat running for a House seat in California's 49th District, a coastal region about 40 miles north of San Diego, launched a host of blog ads focusing on the incumbent in his race, Republican Darrell Issa. Like Roy Blunt, Issa is a marginal Republican villain, capable enough of raising partisan ire but not really fit to touch the hem of someone like Tom DeLay. In 2003, Issa, a multimillionaire, made his name by bankrolling much of the early effort to recall California Gov. Gray Davis; Issa's initial plan was to take the statehouse for himself, but when a more formidable candidate emerged from Hollywood, Issa tearfully departed from the race. Byron's blog ads remind readers of this undignified exit: "Make Darrell Issa Cry. Again."

The ad, says Kynn Bartlett, Bryon's Internet campaign manager, was designed to appeal to a national audience. "We know there's a bunch of angry Democrats out there who don't like the way the California recall went down, who don't like the way he thinks he can buy his way into power," Bartlett says of Issa. Over the course of the campaign, Bartlett did occasionally tweak the messages on his ads, sometimes featuring Byron's strengths rather than dwelling on his opponent's alleged weaknesses. Those happier ads didn't work very well, though.

"So far I haven't got any donations from the positive ones," Bartlett says. "The people on Daily Kos and Atrios, they like the entertaining ads, the ones that make them laugh and that refer to something they understand. They look at it and they go, 'That's cute, I'll reward them with 25 bucks.' The negative ads get more attention and get more clicks, and I guess that's somewhat disturbing." But in politics you go with what works, and what worked on the blogs was the picture of a sobbing Darrell Issa. Within a week of placing this ad, Byron's campaign received many donations, most of them from people outside Byron's own district. Still, it wasn't a blowout -- the campaign spent a few hundred dollars on its ads, and it recouped just a bit more than that.

Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Senator from California, saw similar results from her blog campaign. Although she is an icon to many liberal Democrats, Boxer's ads -- which are featured on Atrios and Daily Kos and are all positive, saying nothing of Bill Jones, Boxer's Republican opponent in November -- did not lead to a windfall in donations.

"We have not raised a substantial amount of money," says Rose Kapolczynski, Boxer's campaign manager. "We've had a few thousand people click through to our site since we launched the ads a few weeks ago, and a few hundred people have taken some action -- we've gotten several hundred people who have either contributed or signed up to be on our mailing lists. So it isn't like some candidates we've heard about who have raised hundreds of thousands." Kapolczynski speculates that "it could be that Barbara Boxer is so well known that many of those people are already part of our campaign. We have nearly 80,000 donors to our campaign already."

That might be it. But another reason candidates like Boxer and Byron have not done better than breaking even with blog ads is that they've made no real effort to convince blog readers of the importance of their run. Ben Chandler's success told candidates that an ad was enough: Build a blog ad and the bloggers will come. But Moulitsas says this is a mistaken premise. It's a myth that Ben Chandler raised $80,000 because he spent $2,000 on blog ads. He raised $80,000 because every political blog was following his run, writing feverishly about the sweet possibility of a Democrat winning a race in the South.

A similar thing happened in the special congressional election in South Dakota, where, on June 1, Stephanie Herseth, a Democrat, won the statewide House seat. Herseth raised thousands through her blog ads, but it wasn't just because she ran blog ads. It was because Herseth actively engaged with blog readers from the moment she launched her campaign, and bloggers like Moulitsas saw early on that Herseth was a serious candidate worthy of his support. It's true that blog ads helped convert ambient support for Chandler and Herseth into hard dollars. But in both cases the ads were just a mechanism, and setting them up was the easy part. Giving people a reason to click on the ads is the hard part.

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