What scares the politicians (especially the old school of both parties) is that they don’t understand what the hell is happening with the blogs, and how the blogs are interfering with business as usual and their control of information.

My curiosity is this: are we riding the roller coaster we’re designing, or are we pushing the pols into the cars and locking them in? Or both?

Setting a path for this blog (or any other blog, for that matter) in concrete is really not what I’m after here. Maybe the question is given the skill sets here, the audience, our interests — what can we change?

I absolutely agree with you, Steve, that this blog is relatively unique in that it has readership and participation across party lines. While we’ve certainly come together on some issues, it never occurred to me that an ambition for this place might largely function as a multi-partisan (is that a word?) political action. I always thought of this site as a partisan progressive Democratic site, with local political interests that sometimes intersected with the like-minded in other parties. I’d like to hear people weigh in on what they think about this.

But that’s good news and bad news in a political influence sense. Wind, eminent domain, and open government have emerged as general consensus topics in the DE blogosphere, cutting across the party lines. Those issues–as with the eminent domain veto story–energize us to the point of major cyber and physical efforts.

Yes, and there’s more that we can join forces on certainly. And this is one of the places where I’m thinking about political influence. This is the political influence of sweat equity (cyber or physical). But another thing that is critical to the influence of state blogs (and a thing that I think is often a kavips project) is the business of ideas for governing. Great ideas are their own capital, and leaving the ideas business to politicians is something we already know is not the smartest strategy.

As for Crashing the Gates — that effort does not need to be world changing, it just has to upset the status quo. And there is plenty of status quo here — just the effort to push back on the Fusion Candidate prohibition is a crashing the gates activity. Specifically to Dem politics, getting more progressive Dems on party committees would qualify as crashing the gates — especially in Wilmington, where access to those seats is incredibly controlled. And I think that breaking up the status quo is a thing that unites many of us.

Oh yeah, blogs are growing. Sometimes it seems we’re at a crossroads. To me a balanced blog (local, state, federal politics, humor, and the personal daily life posts) is the most fun and informative. Sometimes I learn about something I didn’t even know I was interested in… like BWW. Blogs are the art of discovery. Suddenly issues the MSM buries on page 16 are front and center… and open to debate. And, let’s face it, debate is the heart of a blog. You can write all the posts you want, but a blog will die without comments. (Might explain why some of our Headlines are so, well, sensational!)

I’m not sure what we’re “evolving” into, and I hesitate to settle on one direction (in case we pick wrong!). I like the wild west feel that is, in essence, a blog.

At some point I realized that I was learning more about their political issues way more than I knew about my own state. I searched around and finally happened upon DelawareLiberal and the rest of the blogosphere here (love that blogroll). I have been a barfly here ever since…

Example: in NC looking at ways I can help support Mike Munger’s campaign, I’ve been trying to compile a list of the major political blogs and at least, by sloppy analysis, to see which ones have the most influence. So far I am well over 150 active political blogs, and within my limited ability to do the stats, not a single one has the sort of “hub” potential as DE Liberal does here in Delaware.

The nearest equivalent in a Dem/Progressive sense would be BlueNC, but looking at the community and the stats it has nowhere near the centrality to the NC blogosphere than DL has here. For example: for the most part conservatives and libertarians (even “moderate” Dems) ignore BlueNC completely, which leaves it an insular community talking to itself.

Here in DE, DeLIB serves as a major “hub” for a community that actually does cross political lines; pretty much everybody comes here to see what’s going on, and only then do they go to Tommywonk, or kavips, or elsewhere.

But that’s good news and bad news in a political influence sense. Wind, eminent domain, and open government have emerged as general consensus topics in the DE blogosphere, cutting across the party lines. Those issues–as with the eminent domain veto story–energize us to the point of major cyber and physical efforts.

But when it comes to electing specific party-nominated candidates we’re not a unified group. I read the stories about KHN with probably the same semi-academic interest that you guys skim my stories on Libertarian candidates nationwide because it’s not your fight.

I do agree with multiple posters that blogs are having a political influence in DE, but I don’t yet think we’ve reached the point of having a partisan (as in party-oriented) influence, and I’m not sure that the “Crashing the Gates” strategies will work here because the scale appears to be pretty far under the threshold.

However, if we want to get into that business (individually or as a group), then one of the first things I suggest has to be done is to begin quantifying our impact in terms of readers, memes generated that get into the general parlance, and stories broken here before the MSM.

Once we have that sort of data organized it becomes something that candidates and campaign managers pay attention to….

This is interesting — I also know that there is an increasing frequency of “reported blogs” at traditional media sites.

But I don’t think that reporting necessarily = political influence (usually) and it is the later I am interested to discover if we could do more effectively here.

I’m President of my neighborhood association so I certainly know this already. But if you make a case that some action is in that person’s interests (safety, property values, etc) you can get some cooperation.

So that’s it then — we report and you go about your business? Or maybe you are trying to say something about the Delaware political climate?

Steve’s question was about the political influence of blogs if you couldn’t raise funds or supply volunteers for a campaign. I wanted to expand the definition of political influence to not just highlighting issues, problems and behavior to mobilizing folks to exert pressure on the people who could respond. If you are already here and reading daily, you’ve already taken one action – if anything to feed your political junkie habit. It seems to me that long-term or at least deep-impact political influence is less about shining a light (it is easy to find the limits of that light) than it is about constituents raising a ruckus. Other blogs – both national and state – have crossed this threshold and if I read you correctly, Dis, you are thinking that this is not possible here?

Reporters don’t always have time to get out to a meeting themselves but they know that if something truly egregious happened, one of the blogs here would probably report on it.

Here’s a gem from today’s DSN:

“Gov. Minner was surprised she was not mentioned on Lt. Gov. Carney’s Web site as an endorser, but she said she is not offended by the apparent snub.”

I think the political blogs are making an incredible difference, especially in Delaware, and especially this blog.