Beyerstein on the Upside of Outside
Lindsay Beyerstein has a really great piece at Salon today:
In my opinion, though, the real lesson of the Webb campaign is how effective bloggers can be when they’re outside the campaign. I think the candidates who benefit the most from the netroots are the ones who can inspire bloggers to do their work for free. They create unpaid, unofficial surrogates. Webb is a netroots success story because his team captured the imagination of independent bloggers and online activists.
It was always clear that the netroots adopted Webb, not the other way around. His people figured out a way to make the relationship work. Throughout the race, besides hiring Feld and Chernila, his staffers also diligently cultivated relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. The Webb team started taking the pulse of the larger blogosphere before the Democratic primary — and their candidate’s primary victory was due, in part, to intense Internet support.
For starters, the whole column is great and worth a read, so please go. I’m only picking out this excerpt because I think it’s illustrative of what went right in Connecticut last year for Ned Lamont. I wasn’t a “blogger” before last year’s Senate race, though I had blogged a bit. I started this journey as a tireless advocate of Lamont’s candidacy. I could have been hired (I didn’t apply, and I didn’t want to work those insanely long hours) and had absolutely no qualms about “selling out”. I was already all-Lamont all-the-way, and I may as well have been on the payroll, but I wasn’t.
And that is an important distinction. I had a hell of a lot more fun doing whatever I wanted.