MB Civic

Las Vegas, as the ad campaign likes to remind us, is a place people go to untether themselves from reality — to become, if only for a weekend, anonymous and uncensored. It’s odd, then, that Vegas is about to play host to a gathering of ordinary Americans whose objective is precisely the reverse. Next week, 1,000 devotees of the liberal blogging universe — people who know one another only as pseudonyms on a screen, connected by only their running commentaries — will descend on the Riviera Hotel in hopes of affixing names and faces to their online personas. The event has been dubbed the YearlyKos convention, and it is the first-ever corporeal assemblage of the bloggers at the Web site Dailykos.com. These are the people who are said to be changing the very nature of American politics, transforming the old smoke-filled room of insiders into an expansive chat room for anyone who wants in. And so it’s not surprising that Democratic luminaries like the party’s chairman, Howard Dean, and its leaders in Congress, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, have arranged their schedules to address the convention, along with at least a few 2008 presidential contenders. No small contingent of political professionals and journalists will show up as well. (I myself will sit on a panel about political journalism, which is kind of like being the Dunkin’ Donuts spokesman at a cardiologists’ convention.)

Barely four years after Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a former American soldier who grew up in El Salvador and Chicago, started Daily Kos from his home in Berkeley, Calif., the site is now less a blog than a civic phenomenon. With some 600,000 visitors a day, Daily Kos reaches more Americans — albeit like-minded Americans — than all but a handful of the largest daily newspapers. The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm. It is not so much a blog as a travel destination, a place where what you have to say can be more important — at least for a few hours each day — than who you are or what you do.

It shouldn’t be so surprising, then, that the lead architect of the YearlyKos convention is a married, 36-year-old Memphis native named Gina Cooper, who until recently taught high-school math and science. (Moulitsas lent his trademark to the conference, but the whole enterprise was proposed and organized by some 25 volunteers.) Though she had never before been involved in politics, Cooper began to blog, in between classes and when she came home at night, during the weeks before the invasion of Iraq. In just a few short years, at the dawn of the online age, Cooper has gone from banging out her first musings on politics to speaking from the dais of a hotel ballroom, standing alongside the Democratic Party’s most powerful figures. She says she hopes the convention will show politicians that the bloggers are just ordinary Americans — and vice versa. “I think we need to see leaders as people,” Cooper told me recently. “If we keep seeing leaders as magical and distant from us, then we have every reason in the world not to see ourselves as leaders too.”

The party’s leaders see an obvious opportunity here. Ever since Dean became the first candidate created by the Internet, Democratic candidates have struggled to understand and exploit this new online movement in their party — as well as to raise funds through its channels. John Edwards does podcasts from his kitchen. John Kerry posts on Daily Kos as if it were as natural as flossing his teeth. (“My wife, Teresa, blogs passionately, and I follow blogs, too,” he wrote in his first entry.) Reid holds conference calls with bloggers to discuss party strategy. The conundrum for these politicians is that they are used to dealing with definable interest groups. If you want to win over the African-American vote, for instance, you go speak to the N.A.A.C.P. If you want the support of labor, you get on the phone to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But who can deliver virtual voting blocs? Who speaks for pseudonymous bloggers? For the politicians, YearlyKos would seem to put online activism into a familiar rubric. Here, at last, is the impersonal ballroom with garish lighting and folding round tables, the throng of attendees whose hands can be shaken and shoulders gripped. Here is the Netroots as just another influential lobby to be wooed and won over, like the steelworkers or the Sierra Club.

This is, at best, an imperfect view of online activists, many of whom disdain traditional interest groups and can’t seem to agree on what to call themselves, let alone on any common agenda. Even so, the politicians may understand the real significance of this first blogger convention of its kind better than some of the bloggers themselves, who imagine that cyberpolitics is no less than a reinvention of the public square, the harbinger of a radically different era in which politicians will connect to their constituents electronically and voters will organize in virtual communities. Politicians know that politics is, by its nature, a tactile business. New technology may change the way partisans organize and debate, and it may even spawn an entirely new political culture. But at the end of the day, partisans will inevitably be drawn to sit across the table from the candidates they support or oppose, just as votes will still be won and lost in banquet halls and airport hangars and all the other seedy, sweaty stalls of the political marketplace. Online politics can’t flourish in the virtual realm alone, any more than an online romance can be consummated through instant messaging.

That’s because politics, like dating, is as much about the experience as it is about the winning or losing. Whether we’re talking about the reformers of the progressive era or the immigrant ward leaders of the urban heyday, 1960’s antiwar protesters or 1980’s religious conservatives, new political movements have always evolved, ultimately, into thriving social networks. We have seen the beginnings of this online with the “meet-ups” for Howard Dean and the house parties organized by MoveOn.org. As these social circles congeal, their members will inevitably want to share hugs and handshakes with their political leaders, too, rather than merely threads and diaries. The advent of television didn’t change this visceral aspect of choosing our icons, and neither will broadband. As Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, noted in a recent article about pro-immigration protests, the Web doesn’t replace the public square; it drives people to it.

All of this suggests that for all the philosophizing about the meaning of online campaigns and the passing of the 20th-century political model, this next iteration of American politics won’t really look so dissimilar from the ones that came before. Just as the liberal social activists of the first television generation overthrew the urban bosses who had ruled the Democratic Party, so, too, the Gina Coopers of the world, a decade from now, may very well be running for Congress, managing campaigns and lobbying for legislation. This is as it should be. Technologies change and movements flourish, but the essential process of American politics endures. And those who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party’s insider establishment. They simply take its place.

Matt Bai, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia and a potential presidential candidate.