Internet Politics From Both Sides Now

[Commentary] For a brief shining moment, late in the 2008 campaign, Democrats thought that they might own the Internet. A year later, some of the Democrats' advantage is still there. But it's been crumbling ever since Obama took office.

Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State's establishment. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate. It's like other arenas, too, in its capacity to disappoint idealists. Indeed, it may be crueler to dreamers, because it offers an artificial sense of intimacy with politicians, without delivering any practical results. This is the bitter lesson many net-roots types have drawn from Obama's first year in office. The promises of transparency have given way to the reality of backroom deal-cutting. The attempts to turn the campaign's online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped.

In a recent post on the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry captured the free-floating sense of anger with Obama's governance: "The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests ... sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting."