The Internet is an enormously powerful tool for politics. It has the potential to connect up people with unique views spread out over the country. Ideas and interests that were divided up by location can be united via a cable modem. It also has the potential to bring in new voices into politics through the ease and low cost of the communication. There are a thousands new ways to organize and protest –blogs, listservs, on-line petitions, pay pal donation sites, congressional e-mail.
But not much has happened on that front. Examples of successful activism engineered through the blogs are few and far between.
Glenn Reynolds and NZ Bear are working to stamp out congressional pork. She smiles. That’s nice, guys. Good luck with that. When you’re done, please stop global warming, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the mean girls in eighth grade.
Their intentions are admirable. I guess Reynolds got all fired up about pork after Tierney wrote an op-ed on the subject a few weeks ago. Their intentions are admirable, but, but, but… Everybody hates other people’s pork, but they sure love their own. Senator Pork got elected by his home district because he put in a nice rec center in their town and built that army post that employs just about everybody. Because congress is elected by the voters in the home towns and not by their party, then it is absolutely in the interest of every congressman to keep adding on fluff to every major bill and to get the most for their constituency. (Dan Drezner channels Jack Nicholson and responds to Reynolds)
Even though Reynolds is misguided, I do like a nice futile project and am keeping an eye on how this all works out.
Speaking of yelling into the wind, I am going to blog on Monday on the topic of Special Education. I’ve got a little group of other bloggers also blogging on this topic. Let’s see how our minor effort at internet activism works out.
Apt. 11d 
Because congress is elected by the voters in the home towns and not by their party, then it is absolutely in the interest of every congressman to keep adding on fluff to every major bill…
A good reason (one of many) to support getting rid of Congressional districts entirely and use Proportional Representation.
Yeah, my reaction’s pretty much the same as yours. The pork problem won’t get solved unless you address the political incentives that caused the pork in the first place.
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and the ineffectiveness of the Internet is why Trent Lott is Majority Leader today? Why Bill Clinton was able to keep on with his, well, Kennedy-esque habits involving young women and keep it out of public view? Why the Swift Boaters were unable to get national attention for their allegations against John Kerry? Why Dan Rather…
There are a lot of scalps nailed to the wall because it has become so much more difficult to keep secrets. Busting pork is, as you point out, hard (not as hard as dealing with the mean girls, who themselves have gotten a powerful new tool using the Internet to shame the less powerful). It will be interesting to see how it goes.
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Beyond generic comments, what constitutes Pork is usually very subjective. There may be some real pork projects, but there are also many very good and necessary ones.
I would keep the focus more on on the real issue we face–the gradual and systematic attack on the middle class sense of security and the saftey net that was built from the New Deal on.
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here’s a guy from the Kerry campaign who contends that the Reeps have an unfair advantage on the Internet.. worth a read
http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=147a2536-4de0-4716-9cc0-6c681e095ffd
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Thanks, Dave. I’ll check it out.
Those examples that you cite are definitely points for the bloggers. (Just don’t say “Advantage Blogosphere!”) But I would probably define the Trent Lott/Dan Rather incidents as examples of journalistic activism or examples of bloggers as media watchdogs. I was thinking about activism in terms of bloggers not responding to the media, but instead pursuing their own candidates and causes. Like Reynolds trying to get his own grassroots movement together to stop pork. That happens very rarely.
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