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Will online politics lurch right as Obama takes power?
The Democratic blog "Raising Kaine" is set to close, leaving the Web open for the GOP.
By Kimball Payne, The Daily Press - 12/28/2008
Call it politics unplugged.
The start of the new year also signals the end of an influential Virginia political Web site that has grown into a powerful source of information for party insiders. As time runs out on 2009, the site known as Raising Kaine will shut down.
Numerous other sites are already clamoring to fill the void created when the 4-year-old Democratic blog goes dark. But the fact that state political pundits and party activists are hailing the end of the site displays the consistently growing influence of Internet megaphones in partisan wrangling.
The country's new Democratic leadership could trigger an online shift to the right.
"It's more fun playing offense than playing defense," said Brian Kirwin, a Republican strategist from Virginia Beach who writes for the conservative blog Bearing Drift. "You don't have blogs to put out fires; you have blogs to start them."
As the tentacles of the Internet continue to stretch into everyday life, the rough-and-tumble world of political debate has flooded online, which boasts the space to host public-policy discussions 24 hours a day. The loose rules of the Internet also allow sites to delve deeply into speculation, innuendo and rumor.
Collaborators on Raising Kaine discuss a wide range of topics, from regional issues to national problems, using a smorgasbord of partisan videos, pictures and diatribes to flavor the back-and-forth. The blend is clearly a draw: At the end of November, the site reached two big milestones — racking up a running total of 3 million visits and 7.5 million page views.
The organic nature of Internet politics allowed the realm to grow exponentially during the presidential campaign, with President-elect Barack Obama, a Democrat, leveraging his popularity into record fundraising from the Web.
Bloggers were credentialed members of the media at the party conventions and ever present on the campaign trail, tracking the hourly twists and turns of the race between Obama and Republican John McCain.
Candidates routinely used blogs to amplify their messages to voters, and lawmakers have also become more engaged, either showing up for political chats or even starting their own sites.
But rising stature hasn't made blogging lucrative.
"You can't make a living doing this unless you sell your soul," said Norfolk Democrat Vivian Paige, who runs her own blog on state and regional issues.
Still, the expansion of politics on the Internet found fertile ground in Virginia, where sites speak with voices from all parts of the political spectrum. Virginia bloggers have altered political debates and triggered grass-roots campaigns, clearly displaying that the Internet isn't simply a place for idle chatter.
In 2006, bloggers worked to draft Jim Webb to run for U.S. Senate, and bloggers seized on video of then-Sen. George Allen calling a man of Indian descent "macaca" — a little-known racial epithet that helped sink the former governor's re-election bid. A year later, bloggers and an Internet petition with more than 175,000 signatures spurred Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to abandon plans to charge bad Virginia drivers thousands of dollars in fees to raise money for roads.
The shuttering of Raising Kaine could have something to do with the shifting political landscape in Virginia, Kirwin said. He notes that blogs tend to have an outsider mentality, grounded in the feeling that sites offer ordinary citizens a window to speak truth to power.
When Raising Kaine entered the state's political tussling, Republicans had just won Virginia in the presidential race by a comfortable 8 percentage points, they controlled both of the state's U.S. Senate seats and had safe majorities in both houses of the General Assembly.
Democrats now control the state Senate and have cut deeply into the GOP majority in the House of Delegates. In November, Democrats capped a string of statewide victories by capturing control of a second U.S. Senate seat as Virginia voters backed a Democrat for the White House for the first time in 44 years.
"There's an anti-establishment quality to blogs, sort of akin to independent music," Kirwin said. "As the left becomes the majority, being anti-establishment loses a lot of its luster."
Paige is a bit more pessimistic about the role of bloggers and the future of democracy.
"The blogosphere is not real life," Paige said. "It's a small group of people — but a small, well-informed group."
Paige said she tried to use her site to push more traditional media outlets to pursue stories that were being largely ignored. But she's concerned that partisan rifts could hamstring future growth.
"Are the Democrats really going to hold (Barack Obama's) feet to the fire?" Paige asked.
Meanwhile, Kirwin is looking forward to watching a Democrat deal with a vocal online community.
"It's been a tough eight years defending George W. Bush," Kirwin said. And "the blogosphere has never really had a Democratic president."
