'Net Roots' Event Becomes Democrats' Other National Convention

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post

Last month, in a straw poll on the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the front-runner for her party's presidential nomination, won only 9 percent of the vote, lagging far behind former senator John Edwards (N.C.) with 36 percent and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) with 27 percent. She couldn't make it past 4 percent for most of the year.

But as the who's who of the progressive blogosphere -- the "Net roots" -- gather in Chicago for the Yearly Kos convention, which started yesterday, Clinton will be there. Her attendance underscores two seemingly contradictory realities: the growing influence of blogs as a powerful backroom player in Democratic circles and the fact that they don't reflect the views of most Democrats, much less the general public.

"The fact is, the Net roots cannot win elections by ourselves," Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos and the namesake of the event, said this week. "But we can be a key component to a winning Democratic strategy."

The convention's chief organizer is actually not Kos but Gina Cooper, a former high school teacher who became a Net-roots activist and borrowed Moulitsas's nickname to inaugurate the conference last year. Next year it will have another name.

"This event is much larger than any one blog," explained Cooper, "though we're all a fan of Kos and certainly not distancing ourselves from his blog."

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