"Hard Sell"

From Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor of The American Prospect Online:

Warner flops with the Kossaks, gets a bounce with the MSM, and learns that courting the Democratic netroots is no simple thing. Post-keynote, Warner met with a handful of carefully selected bloggers in an upstairs Riviera Hotel & Casino skybox. It was a surprisingly D.C.-centric crowd, featuring netroots regulars like former lobbyist and Clark volunteer coordinator Howard Park; Democrats.com owner Bob Fertik, a Yale-educated proponent of impeaching Bush; labor lawyer Nathan Newman, also Yale educated, now a policy director at a legislative advocacy group and a TPMCafe regular; and Adam Bonin, the round-faced Philadelphia attorney who represented DailyKos founder Markos Zuniga Moulitsas and others before the Federal Election Commission earlier this year as bloggers defended themselves against possible regulation.

Even the outside-the-Beltway bloggers who made the cut for the exclusive sit-down were part of the more establishment crowd. Joan McCarter, 42, a.k.a. front-page writer McJoan on DailyKos, used to be a legislative aide to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, and her father chaired the Idaho Democratic Party during the Frank Church era, while blogger Natasha Celine of Pacific Views cut her teeth interviewing presidential candidates as one of the girls on the bus during Howard Dean’s Sleepless Summer Tour in August 2003.

Warner, a low-talker, and the bloggers discussed everything from labor policy to the Iraq War in soft monotones, but as they did so it became clear that the starry-eyed idealist in the room was the candidate, not the activists, whose deep cynicism about the political system caused them to question Warner’s belief in the willingness of Republican legislators to engage in bipartisan collaborations on such matters as health-care reform. “I’ll just tell you, I think you’re wrong,” Warner told one blogger who said he thought counting on Republican goodwill was a mistake.

A commitment to bipartisan legislating and to a politics that’s neither left nor right might have been a necessity for Warner in Virginia, a southern Red state where he faced a a Republican legislature, but it made some bloggers think he is naïve when it comes to the national scene. “Anyone who believes that if they become President and reach out to Republicans the Republicans will respond nicely is an idiot,” said Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, 34, the laconic economist with floppy bangs who runs Eschaton, one of the top liberal blogs nationwide, over drinks later that day.

“He’s a nice guy with a positive record but he didn’t grasp the gravity of the times,” chimed in Cenk Uygur, the Wharton-educated host of The Young Turks radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “Right now is panic time.”

For people drawn into politics by the tough talk of Howard Dean and Al Gore’s impassioned MoveOn.org speeches, Warner seemed like a relic from the Clinton era, not a voice for the future. “Feingold,” said Uygur. “I love Feingold.”

That was a common sentiment at YearlyKos, and it belies Moulitsas’ frequently stated sentiment that the netroots are nonideological and committed, above all else, to winning.

Not everyone was negative on Warner. “I thought he was stiff but I also thought he was very generous,” said Feldman of Warner’s “Bar Mitzvah,” as some bloggers took to calling the glitzy bash. “The catering didn’t hit the bulls-eye but there was a lot of buzz in that room. Even though people were criticizing it, they loved it.”

Others felt Warner was being condemned by a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” attitude. “I heard a couple of people complaining that it was too excessive, but personally I think he’s in a no-win situation with that, because bloggers always say, ‘Pay attention to us!,’ and then when they do they say, ‘Stop pandering!’” said Hunter, 38, a corporate Internet consultant from Mendocino Country, California, who blogs on the Kos front page and prefers to remain pseudonymous. “I feel for him.”

So did many of the less politically plugged in conference attendees. Indeed, multiple interviews revealed a pattern that would seem to bode well for Warner’s prospects outside the blogosphere, in that the less people knew about him in advance, the more genuinely positive their reaction to his speech was. Attendee Helen Brown, a 50-something housewife with four children from Massachusetts, told me she thought Warner was “sincere, intelligent” and “speaks the truth,” while Diane Palmer, a retired boomer and “gymnastics mom” from Tempe, Arizona, said: “I liked what he had to say. I learned stuff about him. The only other impression of him was that horrible New York Times cover of the magazine.”

Still, all the griping was clearly having an impact on Warner’s internet strategist Jerome Armstrong by Sunday morning, who dismissed the snipers as “ideological” and “pretty left wing.”

“It wasn’t going to be a love-in to begin with,” Armstrong sighed as the final brunch session of the conference wound down. “This was a great opportunity for bloggers to meet Warner. But also, the whole blogosphere and broader press was focused on this event. Coming here was a no-brainer.”