Simple, the exact same thing as a lot of local DFA groups have discovered. People like quick easy bursts of instant gratification. Long political campaigns are hard, take work, and sometimes fail. Calling your Senator and being threatening is quick, faux empowering, and gives you the illusion of making a difference, while not interfering with even the most trivial aspects of one's life.

It's really the same debate as the ones over useless protest marches, etc... Give a lot of folks the choice, and they'll pick the useless, yet fun and easy instant gratification choice.

Sad but true.

have you considered that we were doing more reading than writing?  that might sound lame, but for instance, i didn't comment on any of armando's diaries, but i read every one.

i think that many people expected the "big" orgs (NARAL, PFAW, etc) to get involved and map out a real game plan for us to follow.  i think we also expected that SOMEONE in the senate would step up and become the megaphone for such a movement.

so when kerry finally stepped up, it galvanised people.  even if it may have been too late (and honestly i was not convinced it was too late until this afternoon), it was like "FINALLY!  someone in a leadership position stood up!"  so everyone put all their energy into trying to make it happen, trying to heed the call.  

i dunno.  just some random thoughts.  i'm still processing it myself.

This is a very interesting situation.  I don't think it was attention that was lacking, but enthusiasm or energy.  I think the excitement of someone like Kerry unexpectedly asking for our help was the catalyst.  

I've found that it's sort of hard to determine what will capture the activism and of the blogosphere, even though I've been a lurker around here for years.  It seems like some good causes go ignored, while others become huge.

Sarah
www.carterfornevada.com

We're ordinary human consumers of information. In other words, the dynamic of what captures interest among blog readers is basically the same as what captures the interest of television viewers, although the subject matter is different.

There has to be a compelling story and a sense of involvement. It's not a knock aimed at you, BTW. What major party figure made stopping Alito a priority before Friday afternoon?

There have to be actors (they used to be called leaders.) My blog and your blog aren't there yet, although myDD is highly respected in the left blogosphere.

Blogs are great but they can't pull the load by themselves. We need a symbiotic relationship with the party. Once an actor takes action, like Kerry did, people are more than ready to jump in with both feet and then some.

So one thing we might learn is we have to hound the actors into acting, and sooner.

I can only give you my experience. I felt that defeating Alito was a long, long shot. What got me excited was the opportunity for the Dems to show some backbone. I didn't have the podium to start the firestorm but that was my reason for joining it when I saw one developing. (I can't tell you what caused the firestorm to develop. Maybe your posts contributed to building the momentum, maybe it was something else.) Once it started, I was commenting all over the place in favor of the fight to filibuster and arguing against those that wanted to be more sensible. I do not regret it a bit. Not even though we lost 72 to 25. We have a long way to go in the backbone department but this was worth it. We have to respect ourselves before we can expect respect from others. And if we want to respect ourselves we have to take on these fights.

I think lefty bloggers are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they actually can be leaders.  I think many of them have been reluctant to really climb into the fray and organize on a mass level; it may have something to do with a desire to remain independent and not feel forced to march in lock step as do rightwingers.  

I've often wondered myself why there wasn't more coordination between blogs, more of an effort at mass motivation of our side on particular issues.

I think this past week and a half will make people think again, though.  That was a taste of real power.    

I have spent the day reading comments from other sites.  It is a combination of the boost from Kerry, last minute though it was, and the interest in the Alito confirmation sort of waned at bit, until the date of the vote was set. And now that the vote is over, too many people are ready to throw in the towel, completely.

The problem is instant gratification.  Because the Internet allows us the ability to instantly read and react to news, I have noticed a distinct lack of urgency, if there is a deadline that is weeks in the future (just like most of us did in school when writing term papers ;) ).

Right now, eventhough the final vote on Alito is Tuesday, many people involved in the progressive blogosphere have given up.  Instead of calling their Senators to insist on a no vote tomorrow (as unlikely as it may be), it is as if the cloture vote was the end of it.

This is the battle that we all have to combat in the interval between the SOTU and the general election. This general malaise that has settled over everything I have seen just in the past 8 hours.  It is more pronounced than the 2004 election aftermath.

David (Austin Tx)
http://supremeirony.blogspot.com

I'll admit it. My answer is my hobby horse: We need a quantum leap in blogosphere organization.

Without that, we can make a lot of noise, and we are beginning to have some real effect--as with the WaPo--but we can't take on the super-big stuff successfully.  And so, yes, since we can't take on the big stuff successfully, we will do the symbolically second best thing--be beautiful losers.  You hit the nail on the head with this question:

Did the fact that the fight had suddenly become nearly impossible actually play a major role in people suddenly wanting to engage it?

What do I mean by blogosphere organization?  Well, for starters, some sort of super-blog that is organized heterarchically by issues and geography, at the very least.  This will create all sorts of nodes where different issues and/or issues and geography intersect, which in turn can be represented as mini front pages.  Each of these can have its own customized set of front page posts, recent diaries, recommended diaries, and blogrolls. They will be natural intersection points where independent bloggers will come together.

The creation of such a structure will greatly facilitate the development of far more effective targeted political action, as well as significantly increasing the quality of interactions and speed of people's learning curves when encountering new issues.  It will, quite simply, help to redistribute attention in a much more productive manner, making it far easier for many more people to productively find their way around to want they want to read about and discuss.

By making the blogosphere more coherent, transparent, and manipulable on a daily basis, it will substantially enhance people's sense of empowerment, so that when something major comes along, there will be a substantially higher level of can-do feeling--along with a lot more practical experience in working together successfully online.

This is just one example of the sort of thing we could build that could significantly enhance our community empowerment.  We need to think of 5 to 10 other ideas of similar magnitude, and then implement them all.  We need to generate a quantum leap in our effectiveness as a community.  We've already gone from the power of addition to the power of multiplication. Now we need to go from the power of multiplication to the power of exponentiation.

That's the challenge we face.  If we meet it, we win. Not just online, but in real life.

Well the fact of the matter is that for the most part all the blogs have done to this point is net organize much of the old dead left. You and they pay way too much attention to what the political class says instead of building a real movement for change.

And of course with Alito you found out what the old left really likes to do -- lose. It makes them feel good, because the point isn't too build new, but simply suffer opposition.

The holidays are over and people are more fed up than ever.

In general my immediate family is very political. When my parents first started to date, it was illegal for them to get married. He was white and she was not.

Now decades later, as we all were watching the fight to put Scalito on the bench, my parents in their tired state looked at me and said, "Why bother fighting, he's going to be affirmed anyway." I thought for a time perhaps they are right. They have been politically active for a very long time. They have a lot of experience and insight.  But then I realized this fight is too big not to fight.

I feel incredibly energized despite the loss. I feel that we have lost this battle but we're going to win this war. The most of the 25 democrats who voted for cloture did not do so because they felt strongly about the filibuster; they did it because of the pressure placed upon them from their grassroots. We must keep up the pressure!

When you ask why people were galvanized when Kerry stepped up, I have to say that is a misinterpretation. Kerry stepped up because people galvanized. Between all the various forms of progressive communication, radio, Internet, or television the masses in the grassroots have finally begun to flex their muscle and hold their representatives to task.

The senior senator from my state is up for reelection. I told her that if she did not vote to filibuster that I would not vote for her. She got the message.

The message she got one is a message of deep frustration from the grass roots letting her know that either she will now stands up for progressive values or she is gone.

It's not about to blogosphire it's about the deep wave of anger and frustration of the voters.

Peace

Could this be Peter Daou's triangle in action? I know for me, there are so many "action alerts" on all the blogs I read that sometimes, it just seems like one constant futile fight, and I lose interest. While Kerry's message was missing the critical media aspect of the triangle, what I did observe was that someone from outside the blogosphere was really able to galvanize the community. I also agree with John Aravosis that this fillibuster was poorly planned from the start. BUT, had we had a cohesive media narrative, coupled with politicians leading the charge backed up by the overwhelming strength the blogosphere exhibited this week, I think we could have won. Maybe not on the vote, but at least we would have won on principle, and that would have been the story the media covered leading into the state of the union.

In short, I think this proves what Daou has been saying all along. On our own, the blogosphere can get burned out, distracted and disinterested. A rallying cry from a democratic politician can whip the netroots into a frenzy, and a media narrative can lead to the win.

I think there's two problems.

The first big problem is summed up in one word:  "blog".  Look, I love reading this stuff as much as the next guy, but it doesn't really influence public opinion and it doesn't influence policy makers or elected officials.  Somewhere, there is a formal disconnect between what people out here in commentland think and what the people in Washington think.  A blog just isn't an effective activist organization.

I hate to reinforce this thought, but it does seem to me that conservative blogs, or discussions sites, whatever, serve a different purpose.  Sites like BlogsforBush or Redstate, from my experience of them, aren't trying to influence public and official opinion so much as they are trying to pass on talking points for conservatives. The conservative sites I've been through are a way to get the message out, not to take one in.  I'm not sure that observation is terribly helpful, but it is something to be noted at least.

The second problem is the official Democratic leadership, and this is exemplified by situations like the Alito confirmation.  The Senate Democrats appeared to believe that they could paint Alito as a liar and a bigot, and, most importantly, that they could do all this within the weeklong hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  So, they let the whole issue slide for 2 months without putting anything relevant before public.  The fight could have been won if the official leadership had come out swinging from the day of Alito's nomination--it wasn't an unforeseen event--and maintained a consistent barrage against him for those two months.  

So, in its relation to blogs, the second problem wasn't a failing of blogs, but a failing of the Democrats to stir things up a bit and give us something to talk about.  

Ultimately, there are limitations on blogs.  The format appeals to and is only available to some people.  So, while it might influence official opinion sometimes, it is difficult to expect elected officials to fall in line with what we say.  On the flipside, however, just like everyone else, bloggers' opinions can be influenced by elected officials, and they would be wise to use the medium more effectively.

Leadership was sorely lacking until too late.  I got many many E-mails from PFAW exhorting me to fax/mail/call, but I didn't see Ralph Neas or his crew out raising hell on the tube.  I assume from what I've read that NARAL didn't work awfully hard either.

That surprised me.

Then this afternoon I happened to catch a bit on CNN, and (I'll quote from my blog):

After the cloture vote came down I heard some CNN reporter say there was muttering in the halls of Capitol Hill to the effect of "why didn't Kerry start this filibuster effort earlier? We might have had a chance if he had."

My response to those clowns is "What? Your arm was broke? You could have tried earlier -- why didn't you?"

Why did it take Kerry in Davos?  Why wasn't it Reid, Durbin, or one of the ostensible 2008 Presidential candidates in the Senate?

I'll hazard a guess.  They're too afraid of the word "Liberal."  They desperately feel they have to be in the center of the electorate, and they don't recognize where that center is on the issues, despite polls which tell them liberal postions are overwhelmingly approved by majorities.

I see Reece and I came to the same conclusion while cross-posting.

Quoting Chris:

For weeks before Kerry's announcement, quite a few large blogs had spent quite a bit of time and resources blogging about Alito and calling for Demcorats to use any and all methods to stop him from being confirmed. We had generated what seemed to me fairly little interest from the community, at least compared to other stories that were occurring at the time. However, a couple of hours after the whip count on the filibuster had failed, John Kerry coming online and saying he was trying to organize a filibuster suddenly changed everything. Now, after we had spent weeks calling for the same thing, now only a couple of hours after defeat had already been pretty much assured, now we were supposed to do everything we could to organize the filibuster.

Pardon me for asking this to no one in particular, but what the fuck? Why was the progressive blogosphere community suddenly interested in making a huge stand against Alito only after victory had become nearly impossible, and only after John Kerry--not exactly the most popular Democrat in the blogosphere before last week--had announced that he would give it a shot? What happened?

Don't beat yourself up -- you did good.

Under the prevailing circumstances, it's an unexpected surprise to see a call for a filibuster by a Democrat that has a high enough profile to make a difference. Such is our disillusionment with our party.

I think that we may have made some progress. It may still take a DC politician to pull the trigger, but now they know that the gun is loaded -- for elephant.

For me, the events of the past two weeks finally made me believe that blocking Alito was possible.

As for not commenting on Alito threads, I'm no judicial scholar and there's nothing constructive I could have added.

Maybe others felt the same way? IDK.

I do admit my first reaction to Kerry's statement that he would filibuster was "Wow, he must really want that 2008 nomination." I heard it on the radio on my way to class and i said that outloud.

As for interest I was plenty interested, I listened to the questioning (and raged at because all we were gettin was heroically parsed non-answers) but what more could I do that contact Coleman or Dayton my senators? What more was there to discuss?

I'll say discussion picked up because it's a lot simpler to organize if you have a standard bearer. Of course this probably wasn't the only reason but it's as good as any.

Dear Democratic Establishment: LEAD AND WE WILL FOLLOW BUT FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU HAVE TO LEAD!

blogs in themselves and even well funded internet oriented political action groups are not a sufficient form of social organization to fight the battle that we are now facing.

We need a broader sense of community and we need to involve and activate more people.

Unless we do that we are going to start every political fight or goal as we did this one, feeling that were are coming from so far behind the eight ball that it is hopeless and that will always lead to the sort of mix of defeatism and too little too late effort we saw this time, even if some of us were really energized and engaged as much as we could be in this specific effort.

Its time to admit that the political whores in office just take our blog money and occassionally visit with us, but when it matters to us they just ignore us becasue we can't energize enough people to really scare them.

They stole TV - the live broadcast medium from us. Its owned and dominated of course by corporations who favor the right and feel its good for business to keep us dumb and distracted.

So we need internet TV, our own channels our own content. We need live multi-media point to point multicasting. If we could do that when for example a protest or happening event occurred, even if the corporate media did not cover it, we would be aware of it and we would all get that sort of self and community re-enforcing positive feedback that would help us to better understand that we are not in the minority and we are not alone and isolated and just out of step with the greater public will. Which is precisely the message that they deliberately engineer to dominate and demoralize us on a daily basis. If our greater (potential) community felt we were coming from a position of greater strength and numbers we would be more successful more often.

We need a means of channeling live contemporaneous multimedia content point to point between everyone on the internet any time any place. Blogs and text based media will not energize the greater community of people who agree with our views and goals. And we can set up internet based services (lets say server based) that will send us content types that we would subscribe to. Further, content of those pre-selected types that is popular at any moment could appear in a preset number of windows on the pc screen, and we could switch between them and have the option to record the media files for playback later.

I work in telecommunications and networking and I know that this is now technically possible even if it not not immediately feasible on a wide scale basis as it will have to be. But in any case some small pieces of the technology puzzle are still missing or not as robust as we need and at this precise moment not exactly a piece of cake to make happen.

I wrote about this more than a year ago in this forum and earlier elsewhere.

I said then that it is time to admit that blogs and text based media have their limits and we need to move beyond them to engage enough people to see our greater goals realized.

I am relatively new to following political blogs, and have been in more into watching and trying to understand instead of posting around....but I will add my two cents worth.

As some earlier have posted...it could all be just a lack of focus. But is that lack of focus really due to lack of leadership (just talking bout the blogosphere here)...or because the attention has been spread out amongst too many important and outrageous happenings in the past month.

Alito, NO still in shambles, NSA wiretapping, Iraq, Abramoff, etc...there were just too many things to take the attention away from a concerted effort to block Alito. In addition, the holiday break sucked the life out of any Alito movement, and there were other things to take its place.  I waited to see if there would be some Dem Party action after the break, but they all seemed resigned to defeat.

I personally believe it was the ongoing NSA wiretapping scandal that brought focus back on Alito's views on the Unitary Executive, that kicked people into gear and realizing that he was the key to overturning Roe v Wade, along with officially annointing King George (along with a bunch of other things). That late groundswell seemed to motivate Kerry and Kennedy into action to make this final push.

Hell I think the marginalization of the lefty blogosphere by Howell at the WaPost (and others) had really helped raise the outrage meter and pushed bloggers and readers into overdrive to prove that they were a force to be reckoned with.  This is when Alito finally got in the crosshairs of the pending tsunami.

I dont think the leadership has necessarily been bad, but there are too many important things going down at the same time to diffuse the message. Over the past couple of weeks I have seen some of the blogs working together better on hot button issues, and things will probably get a bit better in the future (along with new voices like Glenn Greenwald).  Things are coming together, and some of the right people higher up are starting to listen.

Chris,

In my view there was very little to discuss about the Alito nomination.  Or rather, discussing Alito himself in the context of his nomination was somewhat beside the point.  We all knew that he was bad and, at least in broad strokes, why he was bad.  I admit, all of the discussion about the Alito nomination prior to Kerry's call for a filibuster was informative, but information alone doesn't activate people.  So people read the blogs, stayed informed, and waited for a call to action that came way too late.  

What was needed was a lot of direction and organizing that just never happened.  I don't think the blogs themselves could have done this, and I am stunned that PFAW and other such groups were not fighting this thing harder and more intelligently. And so what ended up happening is that, when given something quick and easy to do, the blogosphere was able to massively mobilize. But we never really found a way of leveraging the strengths of the blogs to reach out and organize people who weren't already seeing eye to eye with us.  

It's interesting that there were endless posts about, say, Mrs. Alito's tears and the media's response to them.  But I didn't see any analyses during the hearings about who we could count on, who was iffy, who would almost definitely vote with the Republicans.  I think we had some idea, but I never saw anything that was politically sophisticated and brought people up to speed on the Democrats, their histories and predilections, their biases, pressure points, etc.  We all accepted Roberts' nomination in order to allow our leaders to keep their powder dry, but we never got any commitment from them that they'd pull the trigger if X, Y, or Z.  In sum, the blogosphere approached the nomination as if it were a debate and not a power play.  At least that's how it seems to me at this point.                

P.S. "Blogosphere" comes up as incorrect using the spellcheck function.  I'm very tired, so it seems unreasonably symbolic.  But anyway, thought you should know.  

I read the posts here and Armando's posts on Alito. But there was never any post organizing the community to act. What I mean was providing links with the tools - phone & fax numbers, email addresses.

The leading blogs like MyDD, Dkos, etc should have camapign sections that are focused on campaigns on issues with an action plan that enables folks to get engaged.

What these last few days proves is that we have a very energetic base that wants to be heard and is willing to take risks and act.

My suggestion is that influential liberal blogs start a 2006 primary campaign section. The focus here should be action oriented not opining. Specific actionable agenda should be the theme. Let's harness this energy to support and elect real liberals and take-no-prisoners fighters during the coming primary season.

Next let's take the campaign that has been launched against the right wing traditional media shills to the next level by having measurable goals of forcing advertisers on Hardball, etc to fold.

We can make it if blogs can transform some of the traffic and energy of the community to a gale force wind on a specific target.

Various people with heads up their asses are now whining how they need a Great Leader and Why Did He Come Too Late, and they're unpacking all their usual anti-snob and internalized serfdom baggage.  It's sad to watch.

I joined in this thing because it was in a sense too late.  I knew that all the power-hungry opportunists and losers and defeatists weren't going to show up and be counted.   This was Dreyfusard territory- it might just work, but the virtue was in doing it and seeing who would show and give of themselves in what was probably a lost cause.

We now have a tally- we have 25 hardcore Democrats in the Senate and the backing for them.  The Right has squeezed Democrats down to their core and the core has begun pushing back successfully.  About 20 Democratic Senators now know themselves badly humiliated in the eyes of their own activists and colleagues, maybe having won survival from their electorate but lost all dignity and face.  Obama and Feinstein realized they were never going to hear the end of it if they voted for cloture.  Others not fare as well.

Similarly, 5-10 moderate Republican Senators and 5-10 hardliners already in trouble with their constituents are looking at a resurgent activist Democratic grassroots opposition out for blood.  The first controversial 5-4 from the Court in which Alito was one of the majority, whether he goes too far to the Right or sells the Right out, is going to cost them- and they know it.

Beyond that, the real game was to psychologically set the stage for when the next such nominee comes through- the Kerry-Kennedy effort is about making all the moderate cavers-in pay a political price.  It will take a few weeks or months to extract all of this price, but the idea is that moderates and Republicans shouldn't have enough left to spread around to get another Right winger through prior to the next elections.  Elections in which some number of them will pay the usual price- losing office- and be replaced by people who won't repeat their mistakes.