The Blogfather

Netroots guru Jerome Armstrong says he's a freethinking pragmatist. But lefty bloggers say his backing of centrist Mark Warner shows he's become just another political consultant.

By Michael Scherer

Read more: Politics, News, Michael Scherer, Howard Dean, Daily Kos

May 31, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Jerome Armstrong, aka "The Blogfather," greeted me recently in the office of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's political action committee, a block of brick and glass that overlooks the Potomac River in old-town Alexandria. Long before he helped pioneer the netroots movement by launching the blog MyDD in 2001, Armstrong served two tours with the Peace Corps, in Costa Rica and Sierra Leone, and was arrested repeatedly at protests with EarthFirst! and Greenpeace. He then spent a year and a half at Buddhist monasteries, meditating sometimes for 14 hours a day. It's an odd résumé that has left him with a calm, almost Zen-like demeanor, a rare feature for a political consultant in the overcaffeinated world of presidential politics. Shunting the traditional preppy blazer and tie, he wore short sleeves and dun-colored Levis.

But then Armstrong, 42, bills himself as a different kind of consultant, an online insurgent who, with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, aka Kos, is leading "a bloodless coup" in national politics. "We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party -- driven by committed progressive outsiders," Armstrong and Moulitsas write in their recent book, "Crashing the Gate," which sold 5,000 copies online before it was even published. Something is certainly happening. Guest blogging at DailyKos, which gets about 4.5 million page views a week, has become a rite of passage for Democratic bigwigs, people like John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Elizabeth Edwards (under a pseudonym) and Nancy Pelosi. Many of Armstrong's former blogging pupils, who are known by critics as the "Blog Mafia," have been recruited to work for 2006 House and Senate campaigns as varied as those of Connecticut's Ned Lamont, New Jersey's Bob Menendez and Ohio's Sherrod Brown. And next week, roughly 1,000 blog faithful are set to descend on Las Vegas for a four-day conference with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, party chairman Howard Dean, and at least three presidential hopefuls.

Armstrong, for his part, is taking it all in stride. After shaking my hand, he led me to a Thai restaurant down the block, where he sat me down to explain why Washington insiders have the wrong idea about liberal blogs. "One of the misperceptions is that it is a bunch of young kids," Armstrong began, looking a decade younger than his age, with short hair and blue-gray eyes. Another mistake, he said, is the perception that bloggers are left-wing enforcers of liberal orthodoxy, peddlers of what the New Republic has dubbed a "new Stalinist aesthetic." "The blog world is not really ideological," Armstrong contended, between bites of curried tofu. "We are pragmatic. It's not about grandstanding, and saying this is the ideal way to go."

Of course, the conventional wisdom in Washington is quite the opposite. Old-line Democratic consultants and pollsters see the netroots as an alarmist and irrational force, an emotive mob that eagerly calls for the censure of President Bush, opposes bipartisan cooperation, and demands an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq -- positions they describe as hazardous for Democrats at the polls. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive to the activist left," the Democratic consultant Steve Elmendorf said in a January Washington Post article headlined "Blogs Attack From Left as Democrats Reach for Center." For his part, Bruce Reed, the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, cautions that the enthusiasm of liberal blogs sometimes overlooks the real-world challenge of building a majority party. "Anger and opposition are more effective in uniting a caucus than they are in winning an argument or an election," he told me.

But that caricature largely misses activists like Armstrong, who are fiercely partisan but not radically left-wing. Since May of 2005, he has been working on the undeclared presidential campaign of Mark Warner, a centrist Democrat more in the mold of Hillary Clinton or Evan Bayh than Russ Feingold, the netroots' favorite. Warner joins most prominent Democrats in rejecting calls for the censure of Bush. He has supported parental notification for abortion and refused to propose a date for withdrawal from Iraq. He is also, like Clinton and Bayh, aligned with the DLC, the centrist brain trust behind Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" campaign in 1992 and a vocal opponent of Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. "He has both been sharing ideas and getting ideas from the DLC leadership for many years," said Ellen Qualls, Warner's spokeswoman, adding that Warner attended a DLC book party earlier this month. "Is that the sum total of his record or his rhetoric? No."

Even with the DLC ties, Armstrong, who is employed by Warner's Forward Together PAC, has been remarkably effective in getting his boss a welcoming reception on key sites like DailyKos and MyDD. In national newspaper interviews and Op-Eds, Moulitsas regularly trumpets Warner as a favored 2008 contender, along with Feingold, giving the governor the hip sheen of a rising Internet populist. Armstrong has gone so far as to post Warner's picture in a cover box on MyDD, a space that features famous liberal leaders like Thurgood Marshall and Bill Clinton. Inside the Warner campaign, Armstrong's success has earned him the nickname "Ambassador of Kwan," a nod to the adrenaline-filled sports agent in the film "Jerry Maguire." "I think you can argue that the Net and the population online has sort of matured, beyond the initial -- call them ultra-partisans that were with Dean," Armstrong told me. "The spectrum of people, as the number increases, grows to reflect the Democratic Party online."

Such pronouncements have outraged a few liberal bloggers, who see Warner's middle-way pragmatism as just another version of the Democrat lite, which they blame for the conservative takeover of government. In a recent post on his blog, Bob Brigham, a former employee of Armstrong and former blogger on Swing State Project, wrote that the netroots would never unite around a candidate associated with the DLC. "Hiring a netroots coordinator to talk at bloggers while using the DLC content isn't going to get a candidate anywhere," he argued in a reference to Warner and Armstrong. "What is changing about Democratic Party politics isn't just the container, but the content." It is a debate that has quickly become personal. In the comments section of several blogs, readers have charged that Armstrong has traded on his reputation -- and his friendship with Moulitsas and other bloggers at MyDD -- to further his political consulting business. Much of the bad blood can be traced back to the recent flameout of Paul Hackett's Senate campaign in Ohio. Hackett, a dashing Iraq war veteran, burst on the scene in 2005 when he attempted to win an open House seat in a special election, immediately becoming an Internet cause célèbre. In a matter of weeks, bloggers raised him about $500,000 online from nearly 9,000 donors. Though he narrowly lost the House race, Hackett's online support continued into the fall as he explored a run for the Senate seat held by Republican Mike DeWine.

Next page: Unity broken...