I suppose the term mainstream blogs is with us to stay now, whether I like it or not. Further, if there is a mainstream of blogging, I guess there is no way to deny that I am a mainstream blogger. As one of the maybe fifteen people in the country who is blessed with actually being able to make a living out of blogging, and one of the very few bloggers who is blessed with a wide daily audience numbering in the tens of thousands, apart from maybe four other liberal blogs I am about as mainstream as it can get. Then again, maybe I am still fringe--sometimes I am mentioned as a mainstream blogger, sometimes I am not.

So, the prevailing wisdom is that "we" in the mainstream are now failing to adequately cover election fraud. Believe me, I am very familiar with this debate, which became far uglier over at MyDD than it probably did anywhere else in the Democratic blogosphere. The recent culmination of the debacle led to Jerome and I mutually deciding to remove a new guest poster from the front page, largely due to the extreme responses that he stirred up over the election fraud issue. There were lots of nasty diaries, and lots of nasty emails. As someone who is both way out on the left and who has literally worked full time for over a year as a political activist, I do not take kindly to being called a Republican conspirator.

This entire situation is getting ugly folks, and it needs to be talked about. It needs to be talked about not just on the level of what we should and should not be doing about election fraud, but of how we should and should not be relating to each other as members of what is, in reality, pretty small community. The charge of "mainstream" in particular needs to be discussed, because it is only when labeling someone mainstream--institutional--that you can begin to understand them as part of some larger, nefarious plot. So, before I go any further, I would like to spend a little time explaining what my life as a "mainstream" blogger is like, and how it came to take place. I think it might be enlightening for more than a few people.

To be aristocratic for a moment, I would like to start by noting that I am actually one of "you." In fact, unless your name is Josh Marshall or Taegan Goddard, "we" are all like "you." My blogging career began as a commenter on MyDD and Dailykos in early 2003 after a few months of lurking. It was only with the advent of diaries here at Dailykos that I was really able to explore my own ability as an online political writer. I was lucky enough to have quite a few stories promoted to the front page back in the early days of scoop, and to develop a regular diary / column that gained a following. I eventually landed the gig at MyDD and Swing State Project because of my writing in the diaries here at dailykos (in case you are wondering, from what I can gather, my insanity rant from late April, You Don't Know Shit About Iraq is possibly the main reason I am writing at MyDD).

"We," and by we I mean so-called "mainstream" bloggers, pretty much all started like this. Jerome and Kos were both originally commenters over at Taegan Goddard's Political Wire back when it had comments (2001 and earlier). You probably didn't know that, but Political Wire is the ultimate lefty blog grandfather. When Goddard shut off the comments, Jerome transformed MyDD to accept comments, and much of the original community shifted. Eventually, after admiring MyDD, Kos started Dailykos and started a regular link exchange with Jerome. The great Billmon grew out of this community. So did Steve Gillard and Steve Soto. I am sure there are similar stories for Atrios and Kevin Drum that I just do not know.

We were all commenters before we were bloggers. When we became bloggers, I am not sure if anyone, except Jerome, ever expected that things would become, well, so enormous. When I started blogging at MyDD and Swing State Project, combined the two sites were receiving about 1,400 unique visits a day. By late October, the two sites combined to be well over 150,000. On election night, we broke one million unique visits. The weekend before the election, I met Bill Bradley, and he knew who I was before I even met him. As a poorly paid teacher and union organizer who for most of my life had dreamed that I would write a book of poetry that would be read by 5,000 people, I was more than a little unprepared for that level of audience. Considering here we came from, I think we all were.

So, here is how I live. I wake up, usually late (around 10), because late night blog surfing is the best time to really grasp what is going on in the blogosphere (everyone else is asleep, change is much slower, and I tend to not go to bed until after three). I make a five second commute to work from bed to my computer. After checking the newswires, gossip wires, blogwires, around ten select blogs and my "future stories" favorites folder on IE (a series of bookmarks that I decided the day before might be worthy of an article), I try to start thinking about what to write (before the election I always checked the poll wires as well). The way I figure it, every day I need a minimum of four stories and 2,500 words, otherwise there will not be enough new content to keep my readers interested. Ideally, although such days are rare, I write seen or eight posts in one day, totaling around 4,500 words. Hopefully, every day there will be at least one dairy worthy of promotion, and the various co-bloggers (formerly, just Jerome), will chip in between one and four articles as well.

Think about that for a second--the sheer quantity of writing that is necessary to be a mainstream blogger is kind of astounding. With skeleton crews we are providing nearly entire newspaper sections every single day on all of the "mainstream" blogs. I love it--it is without question the best job I have ever had--but it is fucking hard. I wrote eight articles the past two days, and it took me around eighteen hours to do so. Even so, I feel like a slacker. I hate looking at Atrios and seeing how much he has written, even though his posts, on average, are much shorter than mine. I have grown convinced that large quantities of good, original content that you cannot get anywhere else are what makes a blog strong, and I know that is what I must do myself. I know I must do it because, quite simply, if I don't no one else will. In just the last three months, I have written over 400 articles totaling well over 150,000 words. This past Saturday and Sunday were the first two-day I have taken off in three months. Over these three months, I have been paid a little under $6K. While I have become something of a very minor celebrity within activist circles, I will tell you right now that in order for even Jerome to score the level of gossip that he scores it frequently requires getting drunk with staffers that he only tangentially knows.

This is your mainstream--a small group of voluminous writers who are nowhere near as wealthy and nowhere near as well connected as you might think. We operate entirely without constraints except for our own, but also without any guidance except for each other because no one has ever done this before. We are truly independent. We are also utterly consumed by political analysis and commentary. Most importantly, and never forget this, we all came out of exactly the same circumstances that those who are angry with us currently find themselves in. We were frustrated by an environment where we felt an important perspective was not being heard, so we went and set up a forum for that perspective on our own. We are not pros, or old hats, or even natural leaders. Hell, in early August of 2002, I did not even know what a blog was.

Let me put it as simply as I can: we are human, and I mean this in many ways. I mean it in the sense that we are fallible. I mean it in the sense that we have absolutely no institutional support propping us up. I mean it in the sense that we all believe in the power of grassroots organization--of humans--to make a very real difference. I mean it in the sense that we are literally just a bunch of guys writing like crazy on the Internet. We have no master plan, except to help elect Democrats (and we only recently even developed that master plan). Our motives on how we are covering voter fraud can only be understood in absolutely personal and human terms. What does Chris Bowers, the person, think about voter fraud in this election, and how is he able to write about it and do it justice in the course of his life? How is he able to do this without putting the rest of his life on hold? How is Jerome Armstrong able to do this? How is Joshua Micah Marshall able to do this? How is Duncan Black able to do this? How is Kevin Drum able to do this? How is Markos Moulitsas able to do this? What do these few individuals actually think about what happened? Some of these people have businesses, and even children, who they also need to spend time with after literally months of eighty-hour weeks working to defeat Bush (even before I was a full-time blogger, I was doing this for several months). Being a single, lonely guy stuck writing in the small bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment that I share with my best friend / brother, I do not have a family to care for, but I know most of the "mainstream" bloggers do. We are, like I said before, both independent and human. As much as we love you, and as much as we understand your frustration, you do not own us. We are normal people, thrown into extraordinary situations, and we are doing the best we can.

But I guess we have become the "mainstream," with all of the nefarious motives and characteristics that can often be assigned to mainstreams. I am not going to speak for anyone else in the mainstream, but I will tell you my motive about writing about election fraud right now. As someone who is familiar with the Presidential voting patterns of literally every county in the nation for the past several decades, I can tell you without question that Kerry got beat in the popular vote. I never considered Bush the legitimate President because he lost the popular vote, as I would never consider any President legitimate who lost the popular vote. This, in and of itself, significantly dampens my personal desire to investigate voting fraud. In what personally matters to me--and I emphasize that again--as a lone individual who spends the vast majority of my time typing in an empty apartment, according to my view of justice and democracy, righteousness is on Kerry's side when it comes to policy, but not when it comes to being elected President. More Americans wanted Bush than Kerry. Not many more, but more. That matters to me, even as it makes me want to vomit.

I am aware of a number of instances where machines, long lines, intimidation, faulty felon lists, unjustified challenges to registrations and other anti-Democratic measures infringed on people's right to vote. This pisses me off to no end, and the fact that stuff like this occurs on a regular basis in election after election pisses me off even more. I am setting up a special page on MyDD to compile all of this evidence.

When it comes to Kerry winning the Electoral College, the only thing that is buzzing in the back of my head are the exit polls. They are almost never wrong. What happened? We must demand the full release of the methodology and raw data of the Election Day exit polls so that we can better know what happened.

When it comes to writing more about election fraud, I am aware that I am a leader in a wide community (as strange as that may seem to me). For this reason, and because I want to believe it, even though I don't believe it, I intend to write more about it. However, unless something very strange happens, it will never become the main topic of MyDD. Quite frankly, sometimes I think that the only way to satisfy some people would be if this were the only subject we ever wrote about anymore. All fraud, with capital letters, all the time, or else we are just conspirators capitulating to what is obviously a clear but case of a stolen election. That seems to be the opinion of the non-mainstream election frauders out there (yeah, you are mainstream to some as well).

If you feel that what we are doing is inadequate, then your reaction should be obvious. Rather than acting like conservatives and simply complaining about the media, act like the liberal entrepreneurs that you are, and all bloggers are--do something about it. Start your own location where all of this is handled to a level you find satisfactory. As a full-time blogger, I assure you that I am aware of all the election fraud charges, and I would write about them more if I found them both credible and enough to alter the result. However, I am only one person, and the "mainstream" blogs are basically only about ten people. If you were relying on us to show you the truth in the first place, you were already making a terrible mistake, and you have vastly over-inflated views of who we are. We are, in fact, just like you. Without much money, without many connections, with limited time and manpower, more often than not we need to be shown the truth. I can count the number of times when I broke stories or led new lines of attack on one hand (I think it has been four times: partisan index, incumbent rule, poll weighting, and Ginny with anti-conservatism waiting in the wings). Election fraud is a big claim, and if you expected someone else to provide all of the answers for you, then your problem is entirely your own. What do you expect the ten of us to do? Literally thousands of us were unable to prove a connection between Fitzpatrick and the people who hacked Ginny's computers. Start something up, make it good, and show us. We came from you--we are you. We are human. Quite frankly, we need your guidance and your work far more than you need ours simply because there are so few of us and so many of you. If you do not think that what we are doing on the subject is good enough, then fucking show us what we are missing. That is the true nature of the blogosphere--action, not whining.

We are here to help, but don't expect us to do everything. Rather than trying to figure out our motives, act, and through your actions we will respond. Why do you expect anything less from us? When in the past have we done anything less? If blogs were just about talk, then we would all still be saying "Howard Dean who?" Don't complain. Be a blogger. Make it happen.