"By 2008, the blogs are going to be so institutionalized, it's not going to be funny."

The NYT quotes Markos Moulitsas in an article about how the political parties are trying to figure out and take advantage of blogging. Kos is talking about how the candidates are trying to catch up, and that they might get to the point where they are only cluelessly going, "We're hot and we're hip and we're bloggin'.'" Presumably, they need to hire some real bloggers if they want to get up to speed -- like the way Mark Warner hired Jerome Armstrong.

Anyway, an important aspect of all of this is that blogging is not affecting the two parties in the same way, and Kos has a lot to do with that:

On the left in particular, bloggers have emerged as something of a police force guarding against disloyalty among Democrats, as Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant, learned after he told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors "are not representative of the majority you need to win elections."

A Daily Kos blogger wrote: "Not one dime, ladies and gentlemen, to anything connected with Steve Elmendorf. Anyone stupid enough to actually give a quote like that deserves to have every single one of his funding sources dry up."...

Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

Still, Democrats have been particularly enthusiastic about the potential of this technology to get the party back on track, with many Democratic leaders arguing that the Internet is today for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans 10 years ago. "This new media becomes much more important to us because conservatives have been more dominant in traditional media," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network. "This stuff becomes really critical for us."

Hmmm.... But blogging is so different from talk radio. Using blogs to try to produce a radio-like effect could go very wrong, and, indeed, seems already to have gone very wrong. Kos and Armstrong have written their book, but haven't their actual efforts to help Democratic candidates fallen flat? Soon enough, someone will write a book analyzing how their blog hurt the Democratic Party.

You shouldn't want a big, dominant blog pushing your party around. The great thing about blogging is the way individuals can be heard and can spontaneously aggregate and disaggregate as the issues play out. Kos, it seems, is pushing the institutionalization of blogging, and would, perhaps, like to lump those of us who resist that together with lame politicians who think they look "hip" because they're "bloggin'." Get serious, grow up, blog for power!

NO!

As for how Kos treats Lieberman: here he goes again.