Corrections
by kos
Thu Dec 22, 2005 at 01:01:21 PM PDT
- I spoke to the Democratic Senate caucus at the JFK Center, not the LBJ room of the Capitol. I've never been inside the Capitol.
- I didn't talk to the senators about strategy, I walked them through what a blog was, and highlighted the role that the South Dakota conservative blogs had in the defeat of Daschle.
- I don't talk to Rahm every three weeks. In fact, I've never met him or talked to him. Ever.
- I don't talk regularly to Reid. Now his office has a blogger liason who I do speak (email) with regularly, so maybe that's what they were referring to.
- I've never, never, never made a recruitment call on behalf of the DCCC. I've spoken to just ONE congressional candidate this cycle, and it had nothing to do with the DCCC.
Update: Okay, reading on it gets better from a factual standpoint. It looks like he depended on maybe one bad source for that info. Still, I didn't run any Latino group while in college. I was too busy running the school newspaper.
Update II: I don't want to make a big deal out of this, since the piece is generally fine and the intentions were good. This isn't a hit piece. If anything, the errors make me sound more impressive than I actually am. But the mistakes in those first four paragraphs build me up as someone ingrained in the party structure when things couldn't be further from the truth.
All I ask for is that they return my emails when I ask questions, just like any other reporter for any other traditional media outlet would expect. And for the most part, that's the case.
Update III: One last update, since I loathe being self-referrential. First a quick note:
“All he really wants is not to be president, or governor, or have statues built for him,” one of his friends told me, “but maybe to help run the DCCC, to help Democrats win, and to have been right.”
I don't know who this friend might be, but the last thing I want in the world is to "help run the DCCC". I do want to win and be right, though.
But more importantly is this notion that the site is somehow missing something because it is more focused on tactics than it is on policy. The author writes that winners in politics then have to govern. It's true.
But I'm not sure where the notion that Daily Kos had to singularly encapsulate the entire VLWC came from. Everyone has a role. I see Daily Kos as part of our noise machine, with tangents into organizing, fundraising, and even think tank wonkery (like the energy policy work organized by Jerome). But at the end of the day, this site won't replace the need for a network of think tanks to challenge CATO, Heritage, and the like. In fact, our book makes this very clear -- there is no single solution to the problems facing the party. The blogs (like this one) are a piece of the puzzle, but it's a big-ass puzzle with lots of parts.
So the fact that Daily Kos isn't particularly focused on policy isn't a bug, it's a feature. We can't single-handedly rescue the progressive movement. We are but a small part of a much broader whole.
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