Redstate

By trevino Posted in Technology — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

A big loser tonight isn't just John Kerry. It's also Markos Moulitsas and the Daily Kos community that trusted him to direct and guide their fundraising efforts. For some time now, Moulitsas has waged a jihad against the establishment organs of the Democratic Party, and in particular the DCCC, which he regarded as insufficiently willing to support the bold challengers upon whom the future of the Democratic Party in the House presumably depends. Fed up with their staid ways, he took it upon himself to select a group of Democratic challengers -- mostly, but not all, Congressional candidates -- for whom his netroots community could raise funds and donate their own hard-earned money. A spot on the Kos Dozen (actually fifteen candidates) was much-coveted by Democrats in need of seed money and publicity, especially after the much-publicized netroots mobilization for one of its original members, Ginny Schrader of Pennsylvania's 8th District. It was a pioneering effort, and its Dean-style success mobilizing hundreds of thousands of dollars online attracted its share of media attention and admiration from those who would emulate it -- including, let it be noted, the founders of Red State. Emulation has its rewards -- as noted earlier, every one of the general election endorsees that Red State readers generously gave their hard-earned money to went home victorious tonight. And how did the 5,692 donors to the Kos Dozen do?

They funded a half million dollars' worth of losers.

Read on.

The post-election roll call of Moulitsas' hand-picked beneficiaries reads as a litany of woe and defeat:

Tony Miller -- Lost

Ben Konop -- Lost

Dan Mongiardo -- Lost

Richard Romero -- Lost

Samara Barend -- Lost

Jeff Seemann -- Lost

Nancy Farmer -- Lost

Ginny Schrader -- Lost

Jan Schneider -- Lost

Lois Murphy -- Lost

Jim Newberry -- Lost

Brad Carson -- Lost

Tony Knowles -- Lost

Stan Matsunaka -- Lost

Richard Morrison -- Lost

All told, that's $547,157.97 of donated money, squandered on the basis of the mass trust placed in Moulitsas by his readers. (This is, at least, what ActBlue reports -- the actual figure is doubtless higher.) What lessons can we, as internet activists, draw from this? First and foremost, the fundraising power of the internet is powerful indeed. For a half million dollars plus to be raised more or less by a solitary weblog is a remarkable feat indeed, and deserves congratulations. But in a larger sense, this is a lesson we have long since learned -- from the Dean campaign, and from the Bush and Kerry campaigns, as they used the internet to raise not hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of dollars in online donations. The missing element in the Kos Dozen was sound, basic political judgment, informing the decisions on whom to fund, and in whom the donors could place their trust. And therein is the second lesson to be learned: mastery of the mechanisms of netroots mobilization is a different thing from mastery of the methods. Someone in the DCCC is laughing tonight at the humiliation of a bete noir who refused to grasp the value of wisdom and experience in politics -- and paid for it with a hugely expensive and very public 100% failure rate.

It's almost a microcosm of the Democratic catastrophe of the evening. And it's an example that Red State is happy to provide the opposite example to.