250px-dburner_wiki_portrait.thumbnail.jpgIt seems to be in short supply. We were part of the blogospheric effort to raise $123,000 for Darcy Burner when her campaign needed it badly. I can’t think of another contributor who would raise that much money and get repaid like this:

The last-minute fundraising effort in August for Burner was titled "Burn Bush for Burner" and drew about 3,200 individual donors from around the country, said Burner’s campaign consultant Sandeep Kaushik. It was coordinated and organized by some of the nation’s most popular liberal blogs, including DailyKos.com and firedoglake.com.

"They tend to be partisans, no question about that," said Kaushik, a former writer for Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger. "At the same time, they’re not part of the party structure."

Their role in the public discourse is still largely undefined. "They kind of play this weird role that has this superficial semblance to journalism," Kaushik said.

But for all their potential, it’s easy to get carried away by bloggers’ self-perpetuating hype. "There are a lot of overblown statements about the ‘power of the blogosphere,’" he said.

While they may not be tools of the party, they want to help elect certain kinds of democrats, namely, progressive populists who care about issues that matter to them, such as ending the war in Iraq, providing universal healthcare and promoting environmental initiatives that include bans on clear-cut logging and stronger restrictions on development.

A recent example of the bloggers’ influence can be found in Ned Lamont’s 2006 campaign for U.S. Senate against Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. Lieberman ran as an independent after he lost to Lamont in the Democratic primary. Lamont, a wealthy entrepreneur, had the backing of the liberal blogosphere for his strong anti-war stance. But after a tough, freewheeling political fight, Lamont went on to lose to Lieberman, 39 to 49 percent.

As as pressure group on the Democratic Party, Kaushik said bloggers push their own agenda, and that doesn’t always agree with the party leadership, combining elements of a political movement with the behavior of a traditional constituency group. He points to Lamont and his candidate’s campaign as examples of the bloggers’ limitations.

"They’re not at the point yet where they can really swing a race," Kaushik said. His challenge is keeping Burner from becoming too closely associated with the local liberal blogosphere, which overwhelmingly supports her. "Part of my job is making sure people know the blogosphere is not the campaign," he said.

You know, the list of successful Republicans who publicly say "the religious right is crazy, but we’ll use them" is justifiably rather short.

The Burner campaign may think they’ve gotten everything they need out of the netroots and now it’s time to distance themselves. But in doing so they stupidly poison the waters for everyone who comes after them. They need to ditch this clown.

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