NY Times Covers Lamont's Bloggers

NY Times:

For all the pros and cons, the influence of bloggers has become such an article of faith that most serious candidates hire consultants to create blogs and coordinate with other bloggers. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York recently hired Peter Daou, who worked for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, as a “blog adviser to facilitate and expand her relationship” with the blogging community, as Mr. Daou described it on his own blog, The Daou Report.

Mr. Lieberman’s campaign has never had a major blogging component, and it seems to have been blindsided by the vehemence of the blogger juggernaut. A former Lieberman aide now volunteering for the campaign, Dan Gerstein, helped create a pro-Lieberman blog, and last month the senator’s campaign created an anti-Lamont Web site, MeetNed.com, that contains criticisms of Mr. Lamont.
(snip)
“Too much of what passes for political commentary in the blogosphere is pretty juvenile and petulant, and that’s not the way you persuade people,” he said. “If the blogging community is going to have a real impact, they’re going to have to have a reckoning soon about their place in the real political world, because in that world there’s a caricature of them as being dominated by crazies.”

Bloggers involved in the Lamont campaign rejected that characterization, saying they are responsible citizens, attending college or working as real estate agents, teachers and computer programmers. Some expressed concern, however, that the pilgrimage of prominent national bloggers to Connecticut could leave an impression that the buzz surrounding Mr. Lamont is being stoked by outsiders, something they insisted was not true.