"The real hero in this is Keith Crane"

Ari Melber:

While famous bloggers deflect their own hype, it is clear that the netroots played an indispensable role in turning a quixotic, symbolic challenge into a decisive victory. The first netroots activist to break through in Connecticut was Keith Crane, a retired truck driver who sparked Internet rumblings against Lieberman in February 2005--without a blog. Crane had never even touched a computer until 2003, when he volunteered to work on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and he still types with one finger. After Lieberman voted to confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, Crane began a grassroots campaign to recruit a primary opponent and launched DumpJoe.com. Yet as a Democratic Town Committee member in Branford, Crane did not confine his activism to the Internet. While his website highlighted the infamous image of Bush kissing Lieberman, Crane also created hundreds of "kiss buttons" and Iraq stickers that he distributed in the parking lot at the state party's largest dinner in March 2005. He remembers that the buttons struck a nerve because "every car was stopping" to offer a thumbs-up.

Now that Lieberman has lost the primary and declared his independent bid, Crane believes the same approach will work in a general election. "He still can't defend any of his stances. He can't defend his vote on the energy bill or his position on Iraq," said Crane, amid the celebrations in the "bloggers' room" at the Lamont victory party on election night.

"The real hero in this is Keith Crane," said Kelly Monaghan, a 61-year-old blogger for MyLeftNutmeg, a Connecticut blog that predates the Lieberman resistance. "By handing out those kiss buttons, he created the psychic space for people within the Democratic Party to even think about possibly replacing Lieberman," Monaghan added, recounting the netroots' influence during a break from blogging election returns.

Yet Crane's early local outreach was significantly amplified by national bloggers. Back in January, Matt Stoller, a MyDD blogger and premier netroots networker, wrote a candid open letter weighing the race. Virtually ignored by the media and the Lieberman camp, that post outlined the perils of a primary challenge, including opposition from party elders; attacks against the campaign as reactionary; and the potential exacerbation of the bloggers' "crisis of legitimacy," since a loss would let people dismiss the netroots as futile "weirdos on the internet." It also fostered a debate of Lieberman's vulnerabilities and what messages netroots activists should take to the voters. Looking back this week, Stoller said his analysis has held up, though the race also revealed new problems for Lieberman, such as "disaffected union members" and the "insular stupidity of the single-issue group managers." (Prochoice organizations, for example, still backed Lieberman after his refusal to filibuster Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination, a move that surprised some activists who expected issue commitment to trump incumbency for issue groups.)

Stoller met with Lamont in February and introduced the new candidate to Tim Tagaris, a former Marine sergeant who was handling Internet operations for the Democratic National Committee. Soon Tagaris bolted that job to join the long-shot primary campaign, despite warnings of career suicide from DC-based operatives. He helped integrate local and national netroots activists to advance the campaign's top media and political objectives, including the successful effort to extract commitments from US senators to support the primary winner. Reflecting on that strategy this week, Tagaris said the netroots pressure turned a "simple question" into a "two-month news story," reminding Democrats of Lieberman's "disloyalty." It racked up political chits while reinforcing the most damaging charge against Lieberman in a primary. A former staff member of Lieberman's presidential campaign agreed on Tuesday night, conceding that "bloggers changed the narrative of this race" because "they legitimized Lamont for activists early on" and "reminded people about Joe selling out in the past."