Webb won, but it’s a wash for bloggers.
We’re going to read a lot in the coming days about how Jim Webb’s victory in the Senate primary is, in fact, a victory for bloggers. But that’s wrong or, at best, a vast oversimplification.
Taking that on its face, that sentiment would dictate that many voters were swayed by what they read on blogs. I have an extraordinarily difficult time believing that very many of yesterday’s 155,513 voters have ever read a Virginia political blog in their lives. Our collective readership among Virginia Democrats is perhaps as much as 5% of that. (In fact, I’d argue that pro-Webb blogs may well have helped Miller.)
This line of thought may, instead, be referring to the secondary effects — the memes established and spread by bloggers were picked up by the media and by activists, which helped create a Webb victory. (We saw some of this in Tim Kaine’s 2005 victory.) I didn’t witness the blog-based emergence of any thought viruses that managed to infect the media or a large number of activists, though that may say more about how closely I followed the race than about whether it happened. I’ll allow that it’s possible that we bloggers created or spread concepts that favored Webb, but I don’t know of real mind-bombs that would permit any bloggers to crow about our power.
That said, Webb’s victory is a victory for some people who are, in fact, bloggers. Those two individuals are my friends Lowell Feld and Josh Chernila, of Raising Kaine. While they each are best known as bloggers, they are about to be better known as citizen activists.
I first heard about Webb as a potential candidate in late October. Before I knew it, both Lowell and Josh had seen the wisdom of a Webb candidacy; within weeks they’d figured out how to convince the man to run, got together with him, and successfully made their pitch. Having met him, they were both more energized than ever. Their Draft James Webb movement was born by December. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The fact that Josh and Lowell are bloggers is interesting, but it’s not particularly relevant. What’s important is that they’re political activists who saw a good man who they knew would make a good candidate, and they did the extraordinary legwork to persuade him to enter the public arena. The fact that they’re bloggers gave them some credibility, and certainly some experience. But that’s not why Webb ran, and that’s not why he won.
We bloggers deserve no particular credit for Jim Webb’s defeat of Harris Miller in yesterday’s primary. But two bloggers in particular, Josh Chernila and Lowell Feld, deserve a great deal of credit. They’ve shown that blogging is generally just a lot of talking — to effect real change, you’ve got to do something.
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