The blogosphere?
Here's what it does:
1. Connects people and gives them a forum to debate politics. Many of these people probably didn't debate or write about politics before the blogosphere.
2. Helps candidates raise money.
3. Helps connect grassroots volunteers so that they can (hopefully) meet face to face and do something useful besides play on their computers.
Here's what it doesn't do:
1. Win elections. So far, the vibrant lefty blog community has lost elections by consistently pushing candidates to the left. Candidates are afraid to take moderate or pragmatic positions because that might piss some nerd who has achieved iconic status on Dailykos.
2. Represent moderates. The blogosphere is an echo chamber for back slapping amongst partisans on both sides. You do have your "contrarian bloggers" (like this one) but no one reads them, with the exception of Sullivan and Kaus. The sites with the big hits (Instapundit and Dailykos) are mostly partisan hackery at its best.
3. Help bring legitimacy to conspiracy theories. Witness the Gannon controversy and the Ohio vote stealing controversy. The Gannon story was entertaining for a few days...and the Ohio vote stealing thing was an embarrassment to our party. People on Dailykos blame every social/political problem on some unseemly (but unidentifiable) group of consultants, corporations, the DLC, moderates, etc. It's all their fault! We're losing elections because of these coniving special interests! It couldn't be that our liberal philosophy doesn't appeal to more than 50% of the country...
So there you have it. The blogosphere is bringing more extremism to politics. Could the Democratic Party use an outlet for the more liberal elements who held their tongues during the Clinton years? Sure. They're part of the party. But when politicians start taking these quacks serious (witness: Barbara Boxer), we're in trouble.
