The Blogfather

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted June 16, 2005.

If you had to name the two things the Internet has done to change Democratic Party politics the most, going with Howard Dean's campaign and the DailyKos blog would be pretty safe bets.

Dean's Net-based bid for his party's presidential nomination redefined political campaigning: it showed the way to a Democratic politics that wouldn't have to depend on big-money donors, it used a blog as a means of communicating to supporters without a media filter, and it resurrected grassroots organizing through social software hosted on the site.

DailyKos, run by Markos Moulistas Zuniga, has risen to become the most popular political blog out there. A single entry on the blog's main page in favor of a Democrat running for office can net as much money as a fundraiser for the candidate, and as much attention as a profile from a major newspaper. And DailyKos is slowly becoming the epicenter of all Democratic Party discourse -- members of Congress, leaders of progressive organizations, and hundreds of party activists post their own entries on the blog.

What the Dean campaign and DailyKos share is that neither of these two ventures would be what they are today if it weren't for the political activist Jerome Armstrong, who has played a big behind-the-scenes role in the innovation and successes of both. Jerome is the founder of a Democratic politics blog called MyDD, or My Due Diligence of Politics. Before he started his own blog, Kos was posting on MyDD. He credits Armstrong as his "blogfather," and now the two are business partners, currently working on a book together.

Joe Trippi, the former Dean campaign manager, writes in his book "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," that he too, got hooked on my MyDD. Trippi started responding to criticism about him posted by users of the blog. "Pretty soon, I was reading Jerome's blog regularly, and occasionally commenting on my own stupidity. Then, in January, right before I went up to Burlington, [Vermont], Jerome wrote in his blog about a web site called Meetup.com where, he said, some Howard Dean supporters were using the internet to get together in a handful of cities." Meetup went on to become one of the campaign's central grassroots organizing tools, and Trippi would later bring Armstrong on to the campaign to consult on internet issues.

Armstrong stayed in Burlington after the Dean campaign ended, but he has gone on to consult with Democratic campaigns across the country, most recently for the new Los Angeles mayor elect, Antonio Villaraigosa, and his MyDD blog was ground zero for discussion and rumors about the election of the new DNC chair, which just happened to go in Howard Dean's favor. Armstrong and Kos have also founded a political action committee called BlogPac which aims to harness the collective power of the hundreds of pro-Democrat political blogs out there.

AlterNet met with Armstrong in Washington, D.C. to talk about how he started his MyDD blog, got involved in the Dean campaign, and why he sees political bloggers as a growing force within the Democratic Party.

Were you involved in politics before you went online?

Jerome Armstrong: Not much. I voted, that was it. Political participation wasn't on my radar, really. I did some field organizing in in Portland, Oregon in the early '90s. What really got me going was in 2000 when I was working as a day trader. I started following the Florida story online. I'd go into Salon's discussion forums and check out what people were saying. I started my own blog, MyDD, in June 2001. I'd send what I was writing over to BuzzFlash and they'd link to it. Here I was, working as a day trader, and pretty soon 200 or 300 people were reading my articles on the Bush Administration. 300 people isn't that many, but I saw the potential for where this could go right away.

I started getting very interested in elections. 2001, like 2005, was an "off year" for elections. The only big ones going on at the time were the New York City mayor's race, and the the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races, just like this year. I was pretty much the only one blogging about those elections in depth, and people started dropping in on MyDD to see what was going on.

When did you start thinking about the 2004 presidential race?

Armstrong: Well, Kerry was the first one I started hearing about in early 2002, but I wasn't too enthusiastic about him. I read about Howard Dean in an article -- I think the article just mentioned his name -- and searched for his campaign. He didn't even have a site up, just one for his PAC; Fund for a Healthy America. I got in touch with his campaign and found out that Dean was making a trip that May out to the West Coast, where I was living at the time, and so I met up with him in Seattle, where he was speaking to the King County Democrats. I got there early, and Howard was the only one there, so I introduced myself and we talked.

Jan Frel has worked as an editor for AlterNet and TomPaine.com, and occasionally posts entries on MyDD.

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