Are Bloggers Pundits or Operatives?

Think about who those bloggers are on the liberal side.  The fact that any of them would be seated at the DNC convention is a sad statement on where their party is today.

On another topic, there are only so many seats you can have at a national convention.  Are party fundraisers and donors seated with their state delegations?  If not, I don't see why media, why any media, should be seated as so.  And that letter the Dems wrote to Howard Dean...  that whole scene could get really childish.  Are they going to throw temper tantrums because one blogger got a seat and they didn't?

The stereotype is almost perfect. Conservative bloggers are content to act like pundits, while liberal bloggers are activists.

No, I dont see that. I think the RNC/GOP is doing it the RIGHT way. The RNC/GOP is treating one channel of media like another independent source/channel for open reporting, and the DNC/Dems are looking for the payola and pander. The Dems are treating bloggers as extentions of campaigns and as pseudo-delegates.  surely some bloggers want that and revel in the power/attention... but a question:

Who reads blogs and gets influenced by them? Do we just have a leftosphere and rightosphere as seperate islands of echo-chamber discussion or do people in the middle get influenced? And to what extent would that influence be naturally self-limiting when tis overtly associated with campaigns? ie, seating these bloggers as Obama delegates makes any analysis "Why Obama's really not wrong on Iraq"  more than a little bit skewed should that relationship be made clear. ... some times it isnt. Havent we had several blogging scandals of undisclosed interests? (Recent example: Cornyn's David Beckwith was caught by leftie bloggers making comments on their sites without saying he was with Cornyn campaign.)

It would be better to have the bloggers treated as "New Media" and to have people who are in the politics business be open about who they are.

To me, the ideal role of a blogger -- and the one that I strive for -- is melding the first-hand knowledge of politics that comes from being a professional activist with the intellectual honesty and rigor we typically associate with good political analysis.

That sounds correct. But how much intellectual honesty can we expect if the goal of a blogger is not "inform" but "help my guy win". I read up on the left-blogs trying to flog the candidate Noriega here in Texas. Nice try, but its a joke. They are shilling for a guy who has almost no chance, and what chance he has is because the left-blogs will put their intellectual honesty aside and pretend he's running a real race. So its a dilemma for the activist - "Truth" or "What Helps Us Win."

At the same time, you can't be a shill. My blogging would be a whole lot less interesting if I were a total McCain hack.

... dunno ... its worked for Kos. ;-) But you are right - be your honest self, whatever that is, and you'll never have to backtrack later on embarrassing shilling.

I am a (proud) partisan political operative first, and a blogger second. For someone with the day job that I have, it would be problematic to claim journalist status, so I steer clear of it.

Now if we could only get the leftie bloggers to step up to that level of honesty. :-) You hit nail on head ... The original 'weblog' was about anybody expressing themselves. In the political arena - everyone can have a direct expression channel, if they choose. That means activist-bloggers, campaign-bloggers, journalist-bloggers, pundit-bloggers, professors-with-opinions-bloggers. So, political-operative-with-a-mission-blogger is a fine position to be in. but maybe we need to think about how we have all sorts of New Media and blogs on the right and they are not really all the same thing.  Some are closer to real journalism (NRO, TAS online), some are punditry, some mix with activism. We cant say one is 'right' and one is 'wrong' as they are part of an evolving Ecosystem of ideas, thought, communication, etc. Without the punditry and the internet equivalent of the pipe-smoking armchair-on-the-porch-rocking pundits, we might not have our thoughts worked out enough to advance.

So to answer your question - Are bloggers pundits or operatives? - the answer is both. We  have both. We need both. Let a thousand flowers of blogging bloom.

People who approach politics solely as observers and not practitioners tend to be a little bit more naive about the process. They tend to apply their own filters of good and bad without assessing the political realities.

I think being a professional is skewing your view a bit. Naive? Not sure. I've had enough run-ins with various disgruntled conservatives, stuck-on-my-1%-in-the-primary-guy and other forms of political idealism on the right to realize that what you and I call 'realism' is looked by others as a form of selling out. They hold their views on what they want, and they wont change on a dime.

They are not going to say after getting heartburn over McCain on some issues "Oh, since the *realistic* thing is to really, really like Mr McCain so he beats Obama, I am going to start doing that." They cant. Even *I* cant. We have things we care about and we have things we dont care about. And many of these idealists are not 'observers' they are often activists. Just not the professional operators. They are not naive. If I roll the tape back 18 months, The point is, they have their views and they are sticking to those views. The best you can do is explain "Here are the real options of what will happen, and here's how you might influence reality." and hope they get a clue. I've tried to do that many times (going beyond my february promise to only vote for McCain and not help him get elected - I got scared straight by how bad Obama is).