Netroots turn to policy decisions

With Democrats in control of Congress and seen as having a strong shot at winning the White House, the netroots are talking about more than winning elections.

The liberal blogger movement is seeking more legislative victories. To that end, Daily Kos, the pre-eminent liberal blog, plans to start a website focused on Congress this September. Other bloggers, including Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher, are directing an ad campaign criticizing Democrats who sided with Republicans during the recent debate over telecom immunity in the overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

{mosads}“The whole impetus for electing Democrats who are better candidates is to affect policy,” said Joan McCarter, who has blogged on Daily Kos about the FISA debate as mcjoan. “As we get more folks elected who we are aligned with, we can affect policy.”

The netroots have made much of their impact on elections, helping fuel the Democratic congressional campaigns of Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont, Sen. Jim Webb (Va.) and Rep. Patrick Murphy (Pa.), among others. Online donations continue to provide Democrats with a campaign advantage over Republicans this cycle; while Republicans have raised less than $500,000 on the GOP online fundraising website Slatecard that launched last October, Democrats have raised more than $27 million during the same period on ActBlue.com.

But the netroots are now finding more of their energy spent on policy issues, as Democrats are poised to pick up more seats in the House and the Senate. Bloggers spent months railing against a FISA bill that included the telecom immunity. Though they lost — immunity was included in the law signed by the president last week — McCarter and other online critics of the bill believe that they were able to make a difference.

“One senator voted against the Patriot Act; 28 voted against this one,” she said. “We took an obscure issue nobody wanted to talk about and we turned it into a real issue and extended the legislative debate.”

She and other Daily Kos bloggers hope to follow a similar model on their new site on Congress.

“We’ve seen with Daily Kos and other blogs like it that we can accomplish a great deal when we empower regular Americans to take charge of their own politics,” said Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, “and we have high hopes that we can accomplish the same by giving our readers insight into what happens in the congressional sausage factory.”

Hamsher is taking a combative tone to try to get Congress to side with the netroots.

“We expect more bang for our buck” from Congress, she said. The Blue America political action committee, which Hamsher and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald help direct, has run ads criticizing Democratic Reps. Chris Carney (Pa.) and John Barrow (Ga.) for supporting the telecom immunity provision in the FISA bill.

Hamsher noted that the money liberal activists donated online to Democrats in 2006 was given in the hope that the party would take control of Congress, resulting in an end to the Iraq war and greater oversight of the Bush administration. Not enough of that has happened, Hamsher said.

“There’s a reason Congress’s [approval] rating is at 9 percent now,” she said.

But lawmakers and candidates are certainly paying the netroots attention; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will attend the yearly blogger convention, Netroots Nation, this weekend in Austin, Texas, along with more than a dozen Democratic congressional candidates.

Pelosi will become the most powerful lawmaker to attend the conference, which is in its third year. In the two previous years, when it was known as Yearly Kos, the conference hosted then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the Democratic presidential candidates.
Pelosi is likely to receive questions over why she has taken the impeachment of President Bush off the table, how several Democrats failed to vote against the FISA bill and whether Congress will arrest Karl Rove and other former White House aides for failing to testify before a House committee.

The questions, which have been submitted online, reflect some frustration among Democratic supporters over the lack of liberal legislative gains, said Gina Cooper, Netroots Nation’s founder.

“There’s also a whole lot of respect [for Pelosi]; she’s willing to have dialogue with people who see the situation and disagree,” Cooper said.

But she added: “I think right now, they’re watching with an open mind, and they want to see what happens. They’re waiting to see how she’s going to respond.”