Markos 'Kos' Moulitsas on Obama, Twittering, Fighting the Blue Dogs, and the Major Changes Coming

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted May 4, 2009.

What we're seeing in today's era, thanks to, almost single-handedly, the Internet, is that you can influence the gatekeepers.

But you can also bypass them to communicate to people. You can find alternate political structures to support progressive candidates. And you can build alternate forms of distribution for whatever your product is.

We're seeing it today with software developers and the iTunes store. They don't need to get a publisher anymore to distribute their material. They just put it right up on a page and compete on a more or less level playing field with every other developer making applications for the iPhone.

So you're seeing the Internet sort of revolutionize the way we're dealing with gatekeepers. And when they are threatened with being made obsolete, they are more likely to concede to pressure. Because you have an elite, gatekeeping core -- that's never going to go away.

The idea is that we no longer have to be content with the status quo. If we want change, we no longer have to convince that gatekeeper why we want change. Now we can build alternate institutions with influence and power to bypass those gatekeepers. And that makes it a lot easier to then influence those gatekeepers, because they're threatened with irrelevance. Nobody wants to be irrelevant. And if no one's paying attention to you anymore you're no longer a gatekeeper.

DH: Right. That's why all the gatekeepers are Twittering now.

MM: Exactly! But about the Obama stuff. So, any time you have power, power corrupts. But, on the other hand, of course the presidency of the White House may be the ultimate gatekeeper in this country. Over the economy or the flow of information -- over a lot of things.

You're going to have people working to influence them from unfriendly directions. Whether it's corporatists on the debate over the bailouts. Whether it's the right, whether it's well-meaning progressives with just the wrong approach to a certain issue. People will be working to influence those gatekeepers.

So you can't just sit it out and say, "We won," they're friendly to us. Because they're going to be under a load of pressure to act a certain way. And it's easier for them to cave to that pressure if they don't have anybody backing them up. And one way they know they have back up is you make sure you have your voice heard, you show yourself.

DH: Is that happening? Is Obama getting backed up?

MM: I think overall. When he gets attacked, stupidly, by the media, he immediately gets backed up. And sometimes it's warranted. It's interesting. Because what is it even called? This "toxic, bailout" is really complicated.

Within the progressive spectrum, you had economists disagreeing on whether this is good or whether this is bad. I'm not an economist, so I don't really know, but I appreciate that the debate is happening. I appreciate that people are talking about it.

I wish the administration were better at 1) explaining what they think they are doing, and 2) responding to the critics. I don't think that [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner has been particularly honest in some of his responses to some of the more valid criticisms.

Fighting the Conventional Wisdom

DH: Do you get skeptical when Wall Street gets so happy?

MM: Of course! These people don't have our best interests at heart!

The conventional wisdom among the power elite, in media and government, about reality -- the sky is blue -- this is conventional wisdom: after the stimulus bill passed, the conventional wisdom in D.C. is that the conservatives had won this great messaging battle. This huge battle, because they were united.

And nobody ever questioned Republican unity. In fact, we won in 2006 and 2008 by running ads that said Congressman X voted with George Bush 98.7 percent of the time. Unity is their problem, more so than it's their solution. But this was the conventional wisdom, and you saw it on the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times and on TV, and everyone was bragging about what a great victory this was for Republicans because they had been united.

And I knew, last year, that this was going to happen. That the media was going to run with these bullshit, nonsensical story lines that had no basis in reality. We had seen it, in the debates. When Sarah Palin debated, you heard, "What a fantastic job! What Americans saw today is that she's folksy! And real!"

And then the instapolls would come out -- and this was a new development. The instapoll would come out and say Biden won 68 to 22 percent. And I noticed that this conventional wisdom forms. But it has no basis in reality.

And these polls were really a stark reminder last year that polling could be really effective in correcting that conventional wisdom and helping to form real conventional wisdom.

Daily Kos Polling

So I commissioned, at significant expense, a weekly poll looking at the ratings of the entire leadership of this country, in Congress and in the White House.

So you're getting numbers, going up and down, week by week. So everybody was talking about this great Republican victory. And I'm looking at the numbers, saying that wasn't the case. So I launched a counterattack.

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Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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