Invasion of the Netroots

Summer's coming and you know what that means. Seasonal trend stories will be breaking out all over the media. In fact, they've already begun. The New York Times ran a hardy perennial last weekend, about those gigantic barbecue grills that appeal to what the paper called "a primal male urge." Wince if you must, but this is how we news people keep busy when everyone else is outside having fun.

This being an even-numbered year, one of the media's really "hot" summer trends is a political one. The latest fashion accessory on the campaign beat, a must for any cutting-edge story or column, is something called "netroots." If you're obsessive about politics, you already know what the word means. If you aren't, bless you, and here's the dope: Netroots are grassroots Democratic activists who use the Web as their main megaphone and organizing tool.

Yes, you've heard about these folks before under different labels. Sometimes a single word is enough to give an old trend new life.

As the story is told, the netroots made Howard Dean famous and practically snagged him the presidency. Now they are busily going around the traditional party structure and the insiders who run it. The netroots have real power, the narrative suggests, and they might just change the way we elect our leaders.

Several weeks ago, The Washington Post's Outlook section ran a much-discussed piece by Markos Moulitsas, founder of the popular blog Daily Kos and co-author of the book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics.

Moulitsas threw down the gauntlet at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, techily noting that the netroots are displeased with her and might not let her become president: "Money and star power go a long way, but the netroots is now many times larger than it was only three years ago, and we have attractive alternatives to back (and fund), such as former Gov. Mark W. Warner and Sen. Russell Feingold....

Today we regard Hillary Clinton's candidacy as anything but inevitable."

"Ouch," cried Hillary operatives everywhere. Or did they? It's hard to know how seriously to take these media trends and whether they have any impact on reality. Sometimes, the bigger a concept gets in the media, the more synthetic it feels. Howard "Sure Thing" Dean, a trend whose flames I personally fanned, didn't even get the nomination. At one point in his campaign, Dean actually declared himself a metrosexual, a rare instance of two unrelated trends fusing into a single moment of pure nonsense.

In any case, the netroots are here and their media mentions are ramping up. A few weeks back, as the Al Gore boomlet was starting, Associated Press political writer Ron Fournier reported: "Gore is a longtime opponent of the Iraq war, which makes him a favorite of liberal Internet-savvy Democrats who dominate the party's emerging 'netroots.' "

In the current issue of Newsweek, columnist Jonathan Alter writes: "Just as Linux lets tech-savvy users avoid Microsoft and design their own operating systems, so 'netroots' political organizers may succeed in redesigning our current nominating system."

The Washington Post once reported that, thanks to Internet technology, "a new epoch in political communication is beginning ... as ever more citizens gain access to the Internet, and candidates begin to tap it as a means of wide, cheap, direct two-way communication with voters." That was 1994, and the writer was me. The point is, this revolution is always just about to happen. It's the novelty item that never dies, the Chia Pet of modern political journalism.

The sharpest take on the netroots that I've seen so far was a short piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The writer, Matt Bai, pooh-poohed the notion that the netroots are reinventing American political power: "Those who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party's insider establishment. They simply take its place." Next week, he reported, leading netroots will descend from the virtual world for a meet-and-greet at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, just like flesh-pressing pols of old.

Wait—the netroots are meeting in Vegas? Get me a reporter, fast.