Blog: DMI

MyDD has become my favorite blog of late. While it's not the progressive blogosphere's most highly trafficked blog, it's the most intelligent about strategy and movement building.

Matt Stoller led the way earlier this year on discussing whether the blogs should take on Joe Lieberman, and ultimately deciding to do so; rallying support for Net Neutrality, and questioning some of the ultimately destructive anti-movement behavior of well meaning elected officials like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Chris Bowers has the best election forecasting analysis, particularly for the House races. And this past week he has launched two terrific, innovative campaigns. The first was Use It Or Lose It, pressuring Democratic House members in safe districts to donate more money to close races.

More recently, Chris launched a great idea to get the word out about terrible Republican candidates by getting progressive bloggers to link to revealing press articles about each of them, thus promoting high Google rankings (often known as "Google bombing") for those articles about candidates like Jon Kyl, Rick Renzi, J.D. Hayworth, John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Brian Bilbray, Marilyn Musgrave, Doug Lamborn, Rick O'Donnell, Christopher Shays, Vernon Buchanan, Joe Negron, Clay Shaw, Bill Sali, Peter Roskam, Mark Kirk, Dennis Hastert, Chris Chocola, John Hostettler, Mike Whalen, Jim Ryun, Anne Northup, Geoff Davis, Michael Steele, Gil Gutknecht, Michele Bachmann, Jim Talent, Conrad Burns, Jon Porter, Charlie Bass, Mike Ferguson, Heather Wilson, Peter King, John Sweeney, Tom Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, Robin Hayes, Charles Taylor, Steve Chabot, Jean Schmidt, Deborah Pryce, Joy Padgett, Melissa Hart, Curt Weldon, Mike Fitzpatrick, Don Sherwood, Lincoln Chafee, Bob Corker, George Allen, Frank Wolf, Mike McGavick, and Dave Reichert.

Bowers will also (through BlogPac) buy Google AdWords on searches for the name of each candidate, parallelling the very successful campaign by the Drum Major Institute who purchased AdWords on each New York State legislator's name with the score he or she received on their Middle Class Report Card. I'm told that people from small upstate communities who haven't heard of DMI have often heard, and repeat, their legislator's score which they found out about through the AdWords campaign.