Left-Wing Blogs and The Demize of the GOP?

Do the Netroots foreshadow GOP doom?

The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the growing disparity between Democratic and Republican presences on the Internet -- interesting, that is, in its factual background, but an object of curiosity and even puzzlement insofar as its thematic conclusion.

The indisputable facts are these:
Nielsen/Net Ratings provide one measure of the gap. Looking at the Web sites of presidential candidates from the two parties, it found that former senator John Edwards's site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March.... That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders [Giuliani, McCain and Romney].

There are other measures as well. No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.... The Democrats are ahead in the online money race. The top three Democrats [Clinton, Obama and Edwards] amassed more than $14 million over the Internet in the first three months of 2007; in contrast, the top three Republicans ... collected less than half of that, $6 million.

That's the background and facts are facts. When the analysis delves into the causes of the parties' disproportionate presence -- and consequential importance -- on the Internet, however, it treads debatable water.

One reason for the disparity between the parties, political insiders say, is that the top Republican candidates are not exciting voters the way the Democratic front-runners are. Another is that it takes a certain level of technical skill and understanding to be an online strategist, and Republicans admit that "the pool of talent in the Democrats' side is much bigger than ours."

But an underlying cause may be the nature of the Republican Party and its traditional discipline -- the antithesis of the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet.

There's little doubt that voters find the Republican candidates unexciting. The polls certainly reflect that, and my masochistic monitoring of talk radio provides (unscientific) confirmation.

Even among still-ardent Bush supporters and self-described hidebound Republicans, one detects an astounding level of dispiritedness over the GOP's current slate of candidates. They're either too centrist on social issues, or too tainted by an unpopular war, or, more often, just plain uninspiring.

But are the Democratic front-runners "exciting" voters? It seems to me the cited "political insiders" are confusing Democratic-voter contentment with excitement. There's a sense out there among the rank and file that any of the front-runners will do, that they're all pretty closely matched on policy positions, and that any of them can whip any of their Republican counterparts, so just pick one and get on with it. I wouldn't call that excitement, though.

Yet it's the article's contention about the "underlying cause" of disparity -- the uncomfortable clash between the chaotic Netroots and the GOP's "traditional discipline" -- that seems most problematic.

Have conservative sites failed to raise cash and connect with the base because the latter is capable only of switching on an AM dial, and incapable of sorting out the undisciplined Netroots' messages? Or is it because the Bush administration has managed to accomplish what the Democratic Party couldn't? -- the wrecking of the Republican Party. Related to this is what, exactly, is the GOP base these days? The social conservatives? The war hawks? The deficit hawks? The libertarians?

George W. Bush may be America's worst enemy, but he's been Democrats' best friend. He has so upended and severed any semblance of conservatism from Republicanism, his greatest legacy may be that of having launched GOP mayhem and minority status for the next several decades.

The Goldwaterites hate the neocons, the deficit hawks detest the Tom DeLays, the social conservatives despise the libertarians -- and the unifying thread that originally was the Iraq war has unraveled and splintered them all back to irreconcilable basics.

Meanwhile the Democrats largely have the same, fundamental message: let's leave Iraq one way or the other and maybe get national health care rolling while we're at it, both of which the electorate at large is sympathetic to.

It's not excitement. It's the crunch of domestic Realpolitik -- and the one and only blessing of George W. Bush.

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