Candidate blog (continued)   BY ALEX IRVINE

Disagreeing is political activist Stirling Newberry — himself a blogger on "The Blogging of the President" (www.bopnews.com — (BOP)) — who said in a recent interview with the Boston Phoenix’s Dan Kennedy that Internet fund-raising is "going to have a huge effect on every congressional candidate who can nationalize his race."

As if to bolster Newberry’s position, an advisor to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi posted an entry on BOP in which he states that his job is to "try to figure out how we on the inside of the Congressional world of the Democratic Party can effectively promote Democratic values both in Congress, and within the country at large. Blogs have shown a new path for how to do this, but honestly, we don’t quite know how to harness the energy out there."

Nobody does, although for bloggers it’s an article of faith that blogs offer a brand-new thing under the political sun; in the words of Moulitsas in an interview with the Phoenix, "It’s just like when celebrities run, and what we’re doing on the Internet is creating a new kind of celebrity, not somebody who’s as well known to the public as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but somebody who’s well known in a community of activists who are willing to put up their money to support people they care about. Bloggers are creating that kind of connection with their readers and other bloggers. Whenever anyone runs for office, they tap their personal network of friends and business associates, and now this is just a new type of network."

But is this really the case? If every political candidate has to tap a network, how are blogs anything new at all? What’s the difference between blogging fellow travelers and Dad’s friends down at the country club, if the question in the end comes down to patronage?

"Those are earned relationships as opposed to Daddy’s friends or people at the country club. Mary Beth had to work to get the audience she has," Moulitsas says. "She had to earn that loyalty. The blogosphere is very much a meritocracy. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from. I’m a Latino war refugee from El Salvador and I have one of the biggest blogs on the Web."

A meritocracy, perhaps, but one with an entry fee. You can’t blog unless you have a computer, and as Williams has noted, that’s a serious limitation to the number and kind of people bloggers can reach. Atrios, of the Eschaton blog, acknowledges the problem during an email exchange.

"As for low-income populations, that’s a complicated question and I think you’re asking it on both sides," he writes. "That is, how can weblogs reach them given the digital divide and how can weblog writers be aware of the specifics of their concerns. [. . .] While I don’t think my typical reader is particularly wealthy, and I know quite a few are un- or under-employed, I’d be surprised if the vast majority aren’t from a solid middle-class/white-collar background. Traffic’s higher when people are at work, so . . . Let’s face it, people struggling to put food on the table don’t have a lot of time to read blogs. So, the feedback I get and information about peoples’ concerns likely reflect their backgrounds. On the other hand, I do try and bring attention to class-based injustices when I come across them."

Moulitsas, perhaps surprisingly, is dismissive of the issue when interviewed by the Phoenix. "There’s a serious limitation on who can donate money to a campaign, period," he says. "The system exists in a certain way, and we’re stuck with it. Regular people like Mary Beth want to run for office, and traditionally they wouldn’t have been able to. Now they have their own network of other regular people."

Williams, Moulitsas says, "has paid her dues, has become a respected member of the blogosphere, and she has her following. If they want to give her a hand to do what she does, that’s fine."

And they do. Williams, who supports Clean Elections in theory but has opted out of it for her campaign — because, she says, the money would be better directed to underfunded education programs than financing people who are running unopposed — has raised more from solicitations on Wampum than the $1370 she would have received from the state anyway. "I have the Clean Elections amount in the bank, but I have more pledges than that," she says. "I don’t want to take any more money than I need to win this election. If it turns out that I don’t need the money, they can give it to someone else."

Eschaton blogger Atrios says of Williams, "There is a community of thousands of people nationally who know of her. Not many state legislature elections can get any kind of ‘national’ exposure. That translates into potential moral and financial support that she might not otherwise have. That kind of support and attention will hopefully translate into more local exposure — where it matters in the end — so that potential voters in her district who may otherwise not be paying too much to state politics might become aware of her and turn out to vote when they otherwise wouldn’t."

Williams hopes that it does indeed turn out this way. She has gotten "a lot of 10, 15-dollar contributions from people who had read me for the past year and a half. Most of them had interest in me because I’m interested in autism, or because I’m a woman, or because I’m an Indian," but most of them have also come from Maine. "I think, where do we stop? Should I only take contributions from people in Riverton, or Portland, or Maine? I have a contributor from Atlanta," fellow Wampum blogger Dwight Meredith. "He has an autistic child, we’ve been friends for a long time." Why, she asks, should it be a problem for her to accept a contribution from him?

It shouldn’t, but the question still bears asking: At what point does the nationalization of local races tip the scales of influence from a candidate’s flesh-and-blood constituents to her readers in the blogosphere? What happens to representative democracy if funding is decentralized to the point of every candidate raising more money from a diffuse virtual constituency than from the actual human beings in his or her district?

For some people who have spent a lot of time thinking about the issue, this doesn’t matter. Markos Moulitsas is "actively seeking . . . to nationalize every race," citing the importance of the Chandler campaign in narrowing Republicans’ lead in House seats. "That is completely relevant to whether the issues that are important to me are going to make it through the house. It’s directly dependent on whether that House is run by Nancy Pelosi or Tom DeLay. I don’t understand," he goes on, "why a bunch of small donors trying to sway the race is somehow a problem when Exxon and Mobil and all these big corporations are doing the same thing, or having meet-and-greets where candidates meet with big donors and get the big $2000 checks. The system exists. It’s completely skewed against the little people, and now we have a tool to fight back."

Williams isn’t so sure. "Markos and I have agreed to disagree on a number of issues," she says, "and this is one of them. Democrats in Maine shouldn’t just be able to put up a blog ad and say, ‘I’m a Democrat. Support me.’ "

And even if they did, nobody is sure whether it would work. Although Williams says that the fund-raising potential of blogs "is great," and recalls doing a blogathon in which she and a group of colleagues raised money for autism, diabetes, and various political causes, she doesn’t expect more Ben Chandler–style miracles from the blogging faithful: "I don’t think that’s going to happen."

On this, she and Moulitsas agree. "If we raised a million dollars the entire cycle, I’d be absolutely shocked," Moulitsas says. "But this is our way to do our little part with our 20-dollar donations, to do what in the past we couldn’t have done."

This skepticism about the depth of the blogosphere funding pool hasn’t arrested an impulse on the part of state and local political campaigns to stake out positions on national issues. Even Mary Beth Williams, running to represent one-eighth of the city of Portland in the lower house of the eleventh smallest state in the country, takes seriously the idea that her work in the legislature could have national repercussions. "We’re seeing national issues come to Maine," she says, citing No Child Left Behind, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the PATRIOT Act. "We saw the Defense of Marriage Act come to Maine. All of these things will be coming if they haven’t already. No matter how much we in Maine would like to cut ourselves off from New Hampshire and float off into the ocean, that’s not going to happen."

She sees Wampum as the closest thing she has to a platform statement. "When I started this blog, I wasn’t thinking about running for political office. I thought I was going to be working this cycle for a candidate, which I’ve been doing for the past God-knows-how-many cycles. Anyone who actually wants to know where I stand on issues is going to get a pretty good understanding" from Wampum.

But she’s not as much of an evangelist for blogs as most prominent bloggers seem to be. "Almost none of my friends locally, even those who know I have a blog, read it," she laughs.

"I haven’t really honed a message; that’s not who I am. I believe in what I’m doing. I love this city; it’s incredibly important to me. Portland protected my ancestors after they came down from Skowhegan" fleeing violent persecution, Williams says. "They came and found sanctuary on Munjoy Hill."

In the end, it’s this personal commitment to the city of Portland and the state of Maine that will determine Williams’s success as a candidate. Even a star blogger has to keep both her feet on the ground.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com