Sunday, October 01, 2006

Please to Gird Loins

This will be an important class, and I hope you have been hunting around in the blogs long enough to have developed your own working theory (or at least a bunch of questions) about the role blogs and the internet played in this election. A reminder: Our guests will include Tim Tagaris who came to CT to run Lamont's internet operation. And Dan Gerstein, a longtime Lieberman aide with roots in both CT and D.C. Gerstein had left Lieberman but rejoined him to help in the campaign, especially -- I would argue --because the Lieberman operation, pre-Gerstein, could not put out the meme fires that would start on the internet and spread to the MSM. Although the Lieberman campaign did eventually establish a blogging voice, I don't think it had much luck matching Lamont in terms of the support from the hard-to-control, spontaneously generated independent blogs. Why do you think that was? What is there that is fundamental to the nature of blogs that the Lieberman candidacy could not access? And did it matter? We won't really know for another five weeks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the difference between the Lamont bloggers and the Lieberman bloggers is the amount of sponteniety (sp?) or lack thereof. While Lamont has enjoyed the support of many bloggers that he can't necessarily reign in (i.e. the blackface incident of firedoglake) Leiberman's blogs give me the feeling that they are simply an extension of his own political machine. They kind of remind me of the old Gerald Ford debates with Jimmie Carter (God, am I that old?) when Ford was trying to use hand gestures to emphasize his points and ended up looking like a fool because he misplaced the gestures and got it all wrong. (I think it was Ford, anyway. Old brain cells are unreliable.)