Here's a novel idea - get the post-election postmortem over before the vote takes place. Readers of Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog have spent the past few days trying to work out what will be said tomorrow if Joe Lieberman, Al Gore's running mate in 2000, loses the Democratic party nomination for his Connecticut senate seat.
The general verdict is that it will be a great day for blogs. Thanks to the backing of Daily Kos and other Democratic bloggers for challenger Ned Lamont's attacks on Mr Lieberman's Iraq war support, the primary could translate into something approaching a blogs wot won it moment for the US. Even if Mr Lamont loses, blogs will still have done well to propel a previous unknown so far, etc. etc.
So the internet moves ever closer to the heart of US politics. But some of those who have put it there are shying away from the claims others make for its power.
California-based Markos Moulitsas, the Daily Kos founder, told Time it was insulting to "the people that are working hard out there to win the election, to come in and say some guy in Berkeley is the reason why Joe Lieberman's going to lose". The Nation, a progressive political magazine, has put forward the view that it is Mr Lieberman's attempts to dismiss his opponent as an "antiwar challenger backed by loony-left bloggers" that has done most to cast bloggers such as Moulitsas in kingmaker roles.
If the power of blogs is one easy-to-anticipate topic, then where a Lamont win would leave Democratic politics is another. At first glance, a blog-backed Iraq war opponent triumphing against a high profile Democrat who supported the invasion would appear to be bad news for a 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential bid - but if, as this piece (registration required) from the New Republic argues, the Clinton camp's internet strategy succeeds in reaching out to blogs (blogger Peter Daou was recently hired from Salon to "expand her relationship with the netroots") then the Democratic blogosphere could start to behave very differently. It would be hard for a rival candidate to repeat Howard Dean's feat of entering the 2004 primaries as the internet candidate.
The netroots have simply become too large to be the exclusive agent of any one candidate. With her front-runner status, Clinton doesn't need to actually win the blogosphere outright; she just needs to make sure no one else does. And odds are there will be no repeat of 2003, when the liberal blogosphere rallied overwhelmingly to one contender.
Add to all this the scope for viral videos to spread campaign ads and other clips across the blogosphere for very little money - something that has started to happen already - and it all starts to look very wired. So expect more on the political power of the blog. Back to Drum, he is not sure how representative this is of the "underlying reality" but concedes that the "chatter about the power of the blogs is probably more important than whether they really had any power to begin with."
