Hillary plays to the center

In marked contrast to Sen. John Kerry's tone deaf remarks on CBS to Bob Shieffer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton deftly appears to be resisting the urge to play to the activist left that inflated the Dean bubble in 2004 and continues to excoriate Bush as unmitigated political evil. In a piece in this week's Newsweek entitled "The Beltway and the Blogosphere," Howard Fineman dramatizes the split in the Democratic Party as a mini-civil war with centrist Dems like Clinton and even Kerry in his sober moments being viewed as "Vichy-type collaborators" with a Bush administration metaphorically seen as a Nazi occupation.

Those doing the comparison are hyper-left bloggers like Daily Kos and Eschaton, whose verbal pyrotechnics often go from scatological to obscene while describing both the Bush Republicans and those timorous enough to cooperate with the elected administration.

Fineman's thesis overlooks the fact that the far extremes of the left and right on the blogosphere often have a lot of readers, but many of these page-views are by angry lefties and righties not disposed to devote time and money to mainstream political processes.

No mainstream political party will be ready any time soon, I'll wager, will alter its positions or platforms radically to accommodate the growing, but protean, headless monster called the blogosphere. There is, I think, just too much white noise on the fringes to accomplish more than occasional coups de pouce like the Rather unseating or the Cindy Sheehan meteor.

But the important thing about blogs is that they are now being read by the MSM elders and rainmakers. Young Brian Williams of NBC-TV has his own blog which is lavishly praised today by Howard Kurtz in today's WaPo. If Kurtz lays on the slavish adulation, you know Brian has now achieved deification in the MSM pantheon.

The bloggers have partially answered the ancient question "quis custodiet custodes?" with the answer that the media custodians are joining their own peanut gallery. The unelected media guardians may not yet have the most pivotal role, but their noise on the sidelines is being amplified by the amazing growth of the blogosphere.