The second annual gathering of the Daily Kos political blog starts this week in Chicago, and here's all you need to know about how influential the YearlyKos convention has become: Five top presidential candidates are going -- including front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, even though the Kos bloggers don't like her that much.
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Analysts say the community of liberal online activists -- the "netroots" -- has become not only a coveted constituency for the left but a legitimate threat to conservatives, who trail Democrats in online campaigning and fundraising.
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While Democrats flock to Kos, conservatives have ramped up their attacks. Last week on "Fox News Sunday," Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative journal the Weekly Standard, described Moulitsas as "the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left-wing blogs." Kristol predicted it would hurt the Democrats.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee sent reporters a set of YearlyKos talking points with a headline that read, "Democrat Candidates Plan Panderfest To 'Liberal Partisans' At YearlyKos Convention."
"These guys (the liberal political bloggers) have power now. They can change elections," said Michael Cornfield, adjunct professor in political management at George Washington University and author of "Politics Moves Online: Campaigning."
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Though a few blogs and online communities have invited members to gather in person over the years, nothing in the online political world resembles the size and star power that Kos is attracting.
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Most of the partisan political blogs that attract more than 1 million page views a week tend to be liberal, said Justin Abbott, vice president of Blogads, which places advertising on liberal and conservative blogs.
"Maybe it is because conservatives are still plugged into talk radio, and a lot are still using it as their primary source of news," said Bluey. Led by right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh, conservatives have dominated radio for two decades.
Unlike blogs, analysts said, talk radio is a pundit-driven, top-down media.
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Other conservatives say the rise of YearlyKos and the netroots could ultimately be good for Republicans. It shows how the Democrats are leaning left, said Kristinn Taylor, a spokesman for the right-leaning Web site FreeRepublic.com. And he's happy about that, "because anything that drives them over a cliff is good news."
But as polls show that 70 percent of Americans want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the liberal bloggers might be closer to the political center, at least on that issue.
much more at:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/29/MNGRVR91RU1.DTL
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