Unlike the conservative movement of the 1960s, Open Source Politics is a process revolution, not an ideological one.
What matters is not such the destination as the way we proceed toward it. Forcefully, an open source approach of sharing from the bottom-up. Using Internet values.
This is often lost on the Media, which lacks the institutional memory to conceive of anything but a left-right split. It’s always lost on the Right, because it is completely outside of their experience.
This point was brought home forcefully by last night’s star attraction, Senator Jim Webb.
As Markos of DailyKos rightly points out, Webb from the beginning was a Netroots candidate. He had to be persuaded to run. His stands were often to the right of the establishment Democrats’ choice, Harris Miller.
Yet the Netroots supported Webb avidly. Why?
It was because, as many of them noted, Webb had the passion, the personality, and the personal story to take on the Right head-on. He was a fighter. He wasn’t a politician.
After Webb was nominated, he found himself 20 points down in the polls and practically broke, against a well-liked, well-funded incumbent. Yes, Macaca helped close the gap. But remember, that story was pushed by the Netroots. It ran online for days before being picked up by the national media. And after the story broke, the Netroots placed it into a narrative context, unearthing other incidents indicating that incumbent George Allen, an affable conservative and son of the former football coach, was nothing but a closet bigot.
The most effective pushback came not from the Allen campaign, but from the right side of the state’s blogosphere. Conservative bloggers pushed the idea that Webb was anti-woman, that he had as many skeletons in his closet as Allen, that he was a hypocrite. In the end the race was a virtual dead-heat.
Webb was not an isolated case. Other Netroots candidates succeeded in the same way. Carol Shea-Porter upset an establishment Democrat in New Hampshire. Jerry McNerney was loved for taking on "Dirty Dick" Pombo in California. In New York, John Hall was among several Netroots favorites. In Kentucky, John Yarmuth was out-spent by over $1 million but took out Anne Northrup.
In all these cases style points mattered more than ideology, process more than results. The best example came early in the cycle, in Ohio, where Netroots favorite Paul Hackett was pushed out of the Senate primary by establishment Democrat Sherrod Brown. Hackett was to the right of Brown on many issues, and Brown was only accepted grudgingly by the Netroots. Hackett was beloved, and still is.
How will this play out in 2008? History shows the Netroots should win a rhetorical victory, not a real one.
In The 1966 Game, one of first analogies we made was between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon. Like Nixon in 1966, Sen. Clinton represents the old Anti-Thesis, not the emerging Thesis. It is telling in this that she is the first candidate for 2008 to opt-out of spending restrictions for both the primary and general election.
The Netroots don’t like her. The Netroots greatly prefer John Edwards. Even better, Al Gore. If history repeats (and it likely won’t), Edwards will go down early, and Gore will come in too late to deny Clinton the nomination. Her election will be closer than it should be, given the times, and she may well be the most conservative President ever, cementing the Nixon-Bush legacy in many ways, while mainly giving the Netroots rhetoric.
But, as Ronald Reagan and the last 40 years attest, rhetoric can be enough. It’s the process that matters.
