The new new radicals

For the last few months my pre-breakfast morning ritual has been determined by American opinion polls. As a political junkie, the first thing I've done every morning over the last six months has been to check out the latest opinion polls at the incomparable RealClearPolitics. Then I've gone to Politico, FiveThirtyEight and blogs like the HuffingtonPost and TheDailyDish that have done such an addictive job commenting on this memorable election.

So what now? What am I and the tens of millions of other politicos supposed to do before breakfast now that the election is finally over? With Obama's landslide victory last week, American politics is supposed to change dramatically. But what about change on the blogosphere? What becomes of online political opinion when, on 20 January of next year, Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America?

The polls might have temporarily shut, but I suspect that the blogosphere is about to get uncomfortably provocative, particularly if the recession is as long as deep as most economists expect. The Internet is a natural medium of opposition, so expect American conservatives to embrace online media with much more gusto and creativity after 20 January. Whereas the blogosphere has been dominated in George W. Bush age by left-liberal blogs like Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo and Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga's DailyKos, an Obama presidency will throw up new online conservative radicals who, I suspect, will dramatically reshape American political discourse.

Just as the current doyen of conservative muckrakers, Matt Drudge of the eponymous DrudgeReport, made his name exposing the stain-filled scandals of the Clinton Presidency, so a new ecosystem of online Obama-critics will seize control of the conservative movement in America. On the Internet, insurrection leads to insurrection to insurrection. It's a broadband version of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. These conservative insurrectionists -- the Drudge 2.0s of Obama's America -- might yet to be identified, but I'm confident that their online opinion will replace the polls as my not always edifying pre-breakfast nourishment over the next four years.

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

Regardless of electoral votes, by raw popular numbers Obama's victory was anything but a "landslide." My guess is that the conservative blogosphere is not going to wait for Inauguration Day before beginning their campaign for the 2012 election. I would even suggest that there is a cadre of Palin supporters extracting lessons learned from the Obama cyber-campaign!

[Vince Williams]

I agree with Stephen. The journalistic practice of describing electoral college sweeps as 'landslides' distorts the appearance of the true outcome of elections.

For example, Nixon's 1968 victory over Hubert Humphrey was almost universally described in the American media as a 'landslide' for the Republicans, because Nixon got 301 electoral votes versus Humphrey's 191. The popular vote was: Nixon/Agnew-31,785,148 vs. Humphrey/Muskie-31,274,503, or 43.42% vs. 42.72%.

The impression given by media reporting was that Nixon had won a landslide mandate of the people's will, while in reality the election was a near tie of the popular vote.

I've been reading newspapers since 1962, and clearly remember watching the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960. Even then, I thought Nixon looked sinister.

By the time Bush II stole the 2000 election, I could recognize him as a sociopath by his discordant facial tics and body language.