Here’s a profile of Markos Moulitsas, creator of Daily Kos. And here’s an example of why I don’t like Daily Kos:
There was another reason, though, why hundreds of thousands of liberals around the country found themselves addictively checking and rechecking Daily Kos as the 2004 election approached. It made them think Democrats were going to win. Moulitsas wasn’t just posting any polls, he was selecting those that suggested Democrats—from John Kerry to congressional candidates—were heading for victory, while downplaying less encouraging signs. It left liberals trapped in a bubble of reassurance. Heading into the election, it would have been reasonable to assume from the evidence presented on Daily Kos that Kerry was the clear favorite to beat Bush, and that Democrats were likely to pick up seats in both houses of Congress. When none of these things happened, there was a sense of incomprehension. All of Kos’s confident predictions had been wrong.
I dislike shrill, reality-challenged liberals just as much as I dislike shrill, reality-challenged conservatives. It’s never productive to live in a bubble.
I totally agree with you. This bandwagon business is getting way out of hand. Everyone tries to think with one collective mind and nobody thinks for themselves.. and when that happens, it spells disaster. I’ve never played into that scene and I never will. If I like what someone has to say, I will support him (or her). But don’t tell me that I have to believe one thing or another just because “that’s what everyone else is doing.” That isn’t democracy, folks.
Take of the sackcloth and ashes, and stop flagellating yourself, the better to please Joe Klein. There was every reason to believe Kerry would win and there’s every reason to believe the Rethugs stole the election. Or must we rehash Ohio yet again?
As the article says:
Moulitsas wasn’t just posting any polls, he was selecting those that suggested Democrats—from John Kerry to congressional candidates—were heading for victory, while downplaying less encouraging signs.
You miss my point, David.
David,
Sure, let’s rehash Ohio. And then let’s rehash how Bush got, what, 3 million more votes than Kerry nationally? Go rehash that.
I read Kos daily. I have a user ID there. It amuses me the trash that sometimes becomes conventional wisdom on that site. Daily Kos is the Republican party’s best online friend.
Hi folks. I’m DarkSyde, one of the writers on the Daily Kos. There are now almost 80,000 registered users on the Daily Kos with almost 1,000,000 million unique visits a day (Our site meter actually breaks during peak traffic hours so we can’t be certain the total anymore). Anyone can write a diary on Kos, it’s a scoop blog, and other members decide what gets promoted onto the reco list. With those kinds of numbers, we have our fair share of raving lunatics, tin foils hatters, and people who should frankly be on medication. We also have kids, lonely folks of all kinds, war hawks, war doves, war vets, moms, dads, grandmothers, people in wheel chairs, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and trolls of various sundry flavors. It is I assure you inevitable that some really looney shit will occasionally get attention just as it is inevitable that some truly brilliant work will fall by the wayside.
But one thing most of us have in common and all of the front page writers such as myself share, we feel that the present White House and the present de facto one party system are problematic and ineffective in dealing with real problems requiring real solutions and real sacrifice. And, as a direct result of their honest mistakes, glaring incompetence, or blatant thuggery, whichever hypothesis you ascribe to, they’ve found themselves progressively driven to divide the nation, using all manner of clever infantile rhetorical devices such as calling us, along with anyone else who levels criticism at them, everything from ‘fag lovers’ to ‘terrorist sympathizers’ to ‘cowards’. Basically, any ugly, mean thing they can think of to portray us in a negaticve light to the pig ignorant, bigoted, fundamentalist base.
I myself write mostly on matters of science, the same topic which BTW chased me away from an increasingly bizarre Republican party seemingly flirting with the very worst aspects of dogmatic ideology found in politics since the enlightenment. I’m only one of many moderate conservatives or centrist who writes on the Daily Kos, so I don’t think we are quite as ‘raving liberal’ as some would like to paint us. The reason we’re now mentioned so often on winger blogs is because we’re huge and we rose fast. The conervarive blogs are not happy about that: Much like US Car makers early on facing the Japanese imports, initially the right wing was amused by Dkos, then contemptuous, then hostile, and now they’re openly fearful and aggressively ugly.
Dkos has gone from one of the largest blogs, to larger than the *next ten largest conservative blogs put together* in two years. So yes, the Republicans and lots of others routinely use us to produce fear or anger with which to manipulate their faithful, just as they use Gay Americans, minorities, illegal aliens, ahtiesm, anything out of the ordinary, and of course the ever present spectre of terrorism to engender fear, bigotry, and revulsion in their base. Fear sells, fear breaks throgh critial thinking skills and shuts them down, leaving only th less admirable portins of the psyche operating.
FI: To say then that DKos is the Republicans ‘best friend’ is to say that Gays or Muslims or independent women or the ACLU are their best friends, because they use all those groups to stir hatred and produce fear and anger in their base just as they now use us. I’m not sure what ‘trash amuses you’ that becomes or became conventional wisdom. I’d be interested in hearing exactly what that is and what your understanding of the conventional wisdom of our community and writers are?
Tin Man: It may have been election fraud, it may have been bad polling, it may have been some of both. But we posted the same data everyone else was posting from the same sources everyone else was using: Gallup; Rasmussen, etc. We didn’t ‘cook’ the numbers or anything remotely like that. It’s simply a fact of the 2004 election that the polling data was out of whack with the results in many places. It is a bit worrisome that in every case of consequence, that anomaly favored Bush. Maybe someday we’ll find out if there was really fraud, but it may have just been the result of a large turnout stressing the traditional projection models with no significant foul play involved.
Yeah. Its echo-chamber is one thing, but what really turned me off was its growing sense of self-importance. There were lots of posts saying Hillary shouldn’t have joined the DLC because the country actually wants to go more to the left (!), and that Hillary would be taken out because of wratch from the “netroots”.
Of course, the increasing self-importance and the echo-chamber are related. The site may have lots of readers, but it certainly isn’t changing any minds. If it isn’t persuasive, what good is it?
DarkSyde,
Thank you for posting. I’m impressed that you took the time to write that.
There are 2 reasons that I think DailyKos is the GOP’s best friend. First, and the easiest target, is the lack of policing of total lunatics. Yes, I know, moderation is hated by the community, free speech is valued by the community, but as it’s a private community (it is, really- Kos could close it up and go home), for God’s sakes, shut up the WTC7ers and their ilk. That’s just the most obvious example of lunatics, of which there are many. NRO could link to 20 of those diaries a day. Truly offensive diaries that are going to hurt the reputation of the community- such as Friday’s “Who do you hate more- Bush or bin Laden?”- made more offensive by the fact that Bush took a 2:1 lead before saner members of the community started pouring in to reverse the result specifically to avoid bad publicity- should also be deleted. THAT problem can be solved.
Second, although the above aren’t “conventional wisdom” on the site (thank God), some of the things that are conventional wisdom include: 1) Anything that comes out that provides evidence of actual terrorists must be a Bush administration plant. Uh-huh. THAT’s gonna fly with the public. Witness all the “proof” that the bin Laden tape was a CIA fake. Whatever. 2) Doom and gloom economics. There are awesome economics diaries at Kos, full of brilliant points. I read them all. I love them- they’re a primary reason I come to the site. But if someone looks back and sees exactly how some of these predictions played out, it’d be embarassing. There’s a joke that economists have predicted 10 out of the last 2 recessions. At Kos, diarists have correctly predicted 17 out of last 0 Great Depressions. 3) The hostility towards religion. In a country where 90%+ of the population believes in God, a site where 90%+ of the users mock the majority needs to examine the productivity of that mocking. Conventional wisdom at Kos is that Christianity is evil. Really, it is. Do a diary with a poll. That’s a problem.
Finally, look at your language- “pig ignorant, bigoted, fundamentalist base.” In responding to a post complaining about the site being “shrill”, did you really have to include that language? Is that going to win over the voters you need to win over? The fact is- 3 million more votes. Ohio doesn’t matter. In early/mid 2004, I bet 90% of Kos users would have said that the Electoral College should be thrown out in favor of majority vote. Obviously, that was an expedient viewpoint, but Bush won by a much larger vote margin than Gore did. That’s why charges of fraud simply are a waste of time to throw against the wall, and why the GOP would win an election where the Democratic party focuses on fraud. But the community constantly wants to throw fraud against the wall.
Re: poll selection, RealClearPolitics got it way more right than Kos by including EVERY poll, not just a sample. As much as I respect Kos’ posts on polls (he’s usually very good), sometimes he too readily dismissed certain polls as being tainted or by right-leaning pollsters.
Anyhoo, thank you for this response. As I said above, DKos is one of my must-reads every day. I just think there are too many elements of the site that give ammunition to the GOP.
Oh, and even if the site is huge, 80,000 registered users in a country this big could still be an echo chamber. Just as a thought.
Well, pig ignorant much of the base is. There’s plenty of intelligent thoughtful conservatives of course, but the party as a whole has forged an alliance with the Neo Christian right and there are elements within that caucus which are frankly medieval. I said pig ignorant and I’ll stand behind pig ignorant, with multiple references to some of the funniest pig ignorance on the planet if you like.
Make up your own euphemism if you wish, but as a science writer who deals with everything from Intelligent Design Creationism to Divine Water Glasses, coming from the wingnuts every day to the tune of several hundred e mails in my in box, I can tell you that not only are they pig ignorant, many of them are proud of being pig ignorant and gleefully hope to mandate through law that their swiney ignorance become the state sanctioned standard of knowledge.
Same for prejudice and hatred. And while we’re sitting here having a nice conversation about the shrillness and civility and respect for courtesy or whatever it is exactly you’re complaining about, they’re over in their corner loading their glove with ether and brass tacts and trying to figure out how to plant a rumor that Sen X likes to bang farm animals when he’s smoking crack and shooting “H”. That’s a big part of the modern GOP. If you don’t like it, gripe at them, not me. Speaking purely for myself, I’ve found that’s it’s pointless and in fact counter productive to bother being ‘nice’ to a bully.
On the other matters you raise, well, honestly I don’t understand where you’re coming from FI, at least not in my experience at Dkos and as you can guess, I’m all over the site as an admin. I have a pretty good feel for what’s on the reco list, the last couple of front pages, and the new diary list at any given time.
There have been a handful of tin foil hat diaries about the WTC and 9 11 being some kind of nutty set up out of thousands of diaries over the last few months. One of those got on the reco list one time that I know in the last 12 months and most of us had a great time debunking it in comments. Those kinds of diaries generate a a little behind the scenes chatter and we, the mods, do keep an eye on them to make sure they’re not the forefront of an organized effort. There was a concerted effort by a quasi organized group some time ago to over take the reco list with multiple diaries about election fraud (Badly written ones with little or no evidentiary analysis at that) and they were banned from the site after repeated warnings. But really, for us banning is a last resort. As long as it’s a lone voice, if someone wants to spin conspiracy theories or create a whole little club of sock puppets as surrogate fans, that’s their business.
You’re worried that the right is going to use that kind of thing against us? I appreciate the concern and I believe it’s genuine, but the fact is, political opportunists will find something to use against those they wish to smear even if they have to distort or conflate what was said, or they’ll just make shit up out of whole cloth. It doesn’t matter what I write or what members write, that kind of response from the opposition comes with the territory of being well known whether you’re a blog or a political candidate.
As far as needing voters … that boat has sailed. Bush would lose hands down if an election was held today (Maybe even if his opponent was a cartoon inanimate carbon rod); the tide is turning against the GOP and turning strongly, DeLay is hot water up to his slick ‘do’, Frist is under investigation for insider trading, Ney is going to be indicted, Cunningham is doing time, and the Abramoff scandal has barely begun; LIbby is indicted, Rove is under investigation, Bush is less popular than Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate, etc ad nuaseum.
Dkos has grown greatly over the last few years and over the last year that trend is accelerating while simultaneously support for Bush and the GOP has plummeted; We have some of the best writer in blogastan as current and former front page contributors. Don’t get mw wrong, I’m always interested in outside constructive criticism or I would be here. But what would you do if you could run barefoot through Dkos admin tools? I mean why in the world would we want to suddenly introduce harsh, day to day censorship of member created diaries, or do anything to alter the smashing success of the site?
DarkSyde, I thank you for writing.
But where are you getting your data about Bush being less popular than Richard Nixon during Watergate? I don’t see anything like that here. It looks like his popularity has (unfortunately) improved since Katrina and has settled into the 40s. A bare majority of Americans even seems to support the wiretapping. And name a Democrat that would beat Bush if an election were held today. This is what I mean by reality-challenged and being in a bubble. Perhaps it’s just unfounded optimism.
It’s great that you guys are out there – it really is. There needs to be something to rally the base. But Daily Kos should be part of a well-balanced breakfast and should always be read with an eye to who’s writing there.
DarkSyde:
McCain. If he doesn’t strike fear into you re: 2008, I’d suggest talking to ordinary Americans, not Kossacks, for a few months. The Democrats have run impotent candidates 4 out of the last 5 times. Mondale. Dukakis. Gore. Kerry. I think it might have been Kevin Drum who suggested that the party might want to learn that the above 4 lost, and the only guy who won was nicknamed “Bubba”. The party simply doesn’t know how to connect with the average voter. It starts at a disadvantage, since Americans self-identify as conservative something like 31% of the time and liberal 15% of the time. It then, apparently, seeks to act as though that is NOT the case! This is even more true at DKos- there’s the illusion that there is a progressive majority in the populace, which simply isn’t true. I was a political science major- I now do something that’s not a waste of time like that, fortunately- but the newsflash the Kos bubble needs is “HEY! MOST PEOPLE DON’T AGREE WITH YOU ON ALL OF YOUR ISSUES!” That’s where Kos, as a partisan site, and not an ideological site, should start. Too often it starts as “They’re wrong, we’re right,” which isn’t a winning strategy. Kossacks seem to be waiting for the public to wake up and suddenly agree with them, rather than using moderate, reasoned arguments. I’d posit that the majority of the discussions at DKos, while well-informed, do not take the tone needed to convert the swing voters, who, as you may have noticed, may say they dislike Bush, but don’t swing Democratic when they pull the levers. And if you rely on individual cases recently when they have voted Democratic as evidence of a trend, the party will again be outflanked by superior tactics of the GOP.