Regarding the Ohio Senate Primary between Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett … Mother Jones Magazine tossing out a large cover feature on and more or less endorsing Paul Hackett, which In These Times seemed to repond almost directly by doing the same for Sherrod Brown. But the American Prospect asks this question about the race, and the “blogosphere” in general: Given their prospective track-records and the image had of the blogosphere as a pack of ideologues, Why does the ‘liberal blogosphere’ support Paul Hackett over Sherrod Brown, when Sherrod Brown is undoubtedly the more liberal of the two?:

Moreover, Hackett is a friend of the blogs. In our conversation, he told me, “I just like them. I’m not afraid.” It’s a sentiment that may explain blogger Lindsay Beyerstein’s oft-quoted argument for Hackett: “When you get down to brass tacks, Hackett is an invaluable ally — he loves the blogosphere, understands how to harness the power of the blogosphere, and perhaps most importantly, he owes the blogosphere.”

Lindsay, in fact, may be voicing the most rational blogcentric argument for Hackett. The netroots are behaving as an interest group of sorts, supporting not the candidate with the most ideological overlap but the candidate most likely to give them a key to the congressional washroom. And that’s fine. But the question remains, assuming they can help elect Hackett and others like him, what will they demand in return? It’s all well and good to have your calls answered, but is the point really just to chat?

It probably is. That’s all the blogosphere really wants. The Blogging Revolution will end with a Congress, and eventually a president, who spends an inordinate amount of time sitting by a computer, typing out blog-entries at a whim pieced together by, sending out comments to their colleagues’ blogs acting as a mutual admiration society — “What a Great Post, Senator Wyden!”…, and engaging in endless flame-wars across the partisan divide. (Don’t take Reprsentative Schmidt’s bait.)

Paul Hackett may be a unique case study. The Democratic Party didn’t look twice at his race initially: it’s a hopeless cause, write it off to Jean Schmidt and be done with it… he gets no money. Enter the blogs, and by blogs I probably mean daily kos with an echo chamber surrounding it, and that’s who’s financing his campaign. And then… and he nearly wins it. Though, the key word here just might be ‘nearly’, which is to say … he doesn’t quite hurdle over the long odds, and it’s difficult to see him managing to with a second chance.

Second point is that the liberal blogosphere clicks to the idea of squaring round pegs, or getting a Democrat elected in heavily Republican areas. I note something I’ll surmise exists with every frustrated Republican district: “we need to find a Paul Hackett / Brian Schweitzer” — everything would be solved in the 60 – 40 district if only we could bus in either Paul Hackett or Brian Schweitzer, or perferably both.

Paul Hackett, for his part, is doing a bit of political shape-shifting once jumping onto a state-wide race. I spot a bit of political wind-shifting in his stance on the war in Iraq: he’s running statewide in Ohio, he’s for a withdrawal of some sort or other. He wasn’t when running in his uber-Republican district. And thus we get Paul Hackett saying of Schmidt’s attack on John Murtha, derided by most everyone: It’s the Jean Schmidt we’ve seen and heard for many years and obviously 52 percent of the people in the 2nd District like that. And a statement, made initially when Sherrod Brown decided to run, that Ohio isn’t likely to elect someone as liberal as Brown.
…………..
I guess Howard Dean is the original Blog-creation. Okay… watch this carefully:

JEREMY SCAHILL: Governor Dean, why did you say in March 2003 that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction? Governor Dean? Why did you say —

HOWARD DEAN: Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not the best time to talk about it.

Jermey Scahill has recently come back to that conversation in penning this qualm on the current war debate:

During the New Hampshire primary in January 2004, which I covered for Democracy Now!, I confronted Dean about that statement. I asked him on what intelligence he based that allegation. “Talks with people who were knowledgeable,” Dean told me. “Including a series of folks that work in the Clinton administration.”

How does that jibe with the official Democratic line that they were misled by the Bush administration? Sounds like Howard Dean, head of the Democratic Party, was misled by….the Democrats. Dean’s candor offers us a rare glimpse into the painful truth of the matter. As unpopular as this is to say, when President Bush accuses the Democrats of “rewriting history” on Iraq, he is right.

Sure, Bush is partly right, and there is a whole heck of a lot of political shape-shifting going on. (But, in defense of political hackneying: that is our only hope of moving forward in a decent direction, so sometimes if you can guage a politician’s future intentions correctly, you just kind of have to look the other way and wink and nod.) But the idea that the Bush Administration lied us into war based on cooked up intelligence and the idea that the official line on the threat of Saddam Hussein’s “WMD” program amongst “everybody that mattered” was wrong are not mutually exclusive. Quotation number one in my personal arsenal, Colin Powell with: “But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases,deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.” (I have previously misquoted him as saying “intentionally misleading”, which is why when you google that phrase with Colin Powell, a Skull/ Bones blog entry is the only item that pops up.)

But now take a look at the Democracy Now! transcript, and you will see why… I liked Howard Dean. John Kerry looks horrible in answering the question. John Edwards moved away from the issue, because he was initially outflanking Kerry on being pro-Iraq War due to his sense of inadequency of foreign policy credentials (Kerry was going to rely heavily on his Vietnam War experience), but he eventually had to move to a reliance on a sort of populist domestic message. Never mind Lieberman, who you will remember said this upon placing fifth in the New Hampshire Primary:

Based on the returns that we’ve seen tonight, thanks to the people of New Hampshire, we are in a three-way split decision for third place.

… if he felt he could get away with it, he would be on the newsmax bandwagon proclaiming both that we had uncovered mass quantities of weapons of mass destruction as well as they had all been moved to Syria and buried just moments before Coalition troops marched into Baghdad.

And Howard Dean’s answer… comes out cleanly. Further, it suggests a fundamental facet of the war with Iraq: the relatively paltry amounts of wmds that might be in Iraq (and, based on my reading I never thought Saddam had much… I also point to a cover-article in the pro-war New Republic in 2002 with a title of “Why Nuclear Weapons are the only WMDs that Matter” — and I myself never thought Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program — basically because the IAEA told me he didn’t.) — it’s still not worth a war in the eyes of Howard Dean. (Or, if you want to be a cynic, that’s a tenuable political position to spot yourself at.) Thus… beyond the war itself… a judgement call is made, and it is the right judgement. Limited by the conventions of the Establishment though he is stuck in.

Okay?

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