It's official : Hillary to run for President, so she kills the Liberal Blogosphere first

With Peter Daou's hiring, Hillary Clinton sends a very loud and clear message that she is running for President. It also demonstrates that, if she is going to run, she needs to destroy the Liberal Blogosphere as we know it.

Long live the liberal blogosphere.

It was good while it lasted.

From A Well-Known Political Blogger Is Hired by the Clinton Campaign - New York Times:

WASHINGTON, June 26 -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hired Peter Daou, one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation, to help disseminate her message in a forum that has not always been that hospitable to her.

The move underscores the degree to which bloggers --the authors of Web logs, or blogs-- have begun to transform American politics. In many cases, candidates have even set up their own blogs, with staffers answering questions, presenting policy proposals and posting campaign literature and videos. Mrs. Clinton, who is up for re-election this year and is a possible presidential candidate for 2008, has been a frequent target of bloggers, particularly liberals who are angry over her refusal to disavow her vote in 2002 to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq.

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With Peter, "I'm down with triangulation" Daou, we have proof positive that the so-called blog revolution as witnessed in the Liberal Blogosphere was a manufactured by lower level political consultants with access to big media yet shut out by consulting turf wars on The Hill, and after the groundbreaking Howard Dean and Wesley Clark campaign. Yeah, I'm counting the Clarkites because unfortunately a lot of people don't give credit to the technological and networking innovations of the Clark campaign.

I mean, c'mon. Daou worked for John Kerry in 2004. Markos and Jerome with Dean. There are many more prominent bloggers who came out of the various 2004 campaigns but I'm being lazy at the moment to name them all.

The point being : It does not matter if you are a good or bad political consultant. The point is these people are not really "the grassroots". We are not yet the grassroots.

People with a vested economic interest in candidacies cannot agence or put forth a true revolutionary movement. Which is why I have said over and over again, this so-called revolution is not true at all. We have peeked into what is possible. Let's say, what we are seeing is the proof-of-concept; but to get the 18 year-old kid in Loisaida to feel compelled to plug into the political process, we have a loooooong way to go.

To make this a real democratic movement, we will need to walk away from the wannabe king-makers and really invest our time and energies into advocacy organizations and citizen networks. We need to get people and advocates together in the same online communities, email lists, forums and chat rooms as well as the meetups, rallies and door-to-door friendraisings.

We need to bring everyday citizens who don't have time to work as activists or write as pundits but want to do more, contribute more personally (not just financially), to the causes they care the most. We need to make it easy for regular folks to be engaged in the political process.

With the death of the liberal blogosphere hopefully we will see a true progressive movement arise online and off.

Long live the liberal blogosphere.

May it rest in pieces and and may we witness a million progressive networks rise from the remains.

It was interesting while it lasted.

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