Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

There was an interesting discussion on the Jan. 27 edition of Fox News Watch regarding the role of the "netroots" in the presidential election process, after Sen. Hillary Clinton annoaunced her candidacy via her website.

BURNS: This is a matter, then - using the Internet, then, is a matter, not of reaching numbers so much as reaching the right numbers. It's a demographic matter. I did some research on this: 62 percent of the households in this country have computers. Ninety-eight percent have television. So obviously, Cal, if you want to reach just numbers, you should make your announcement on television.

THOMAS: Well, yes. But you get the benefit - it's sort of like doing a one-time campaign commercial - if the networks pick it up, you get free time on broadcast.

Neal says that they're doing this to raise money like Howard Dean did, and he's right. But they're also doing to use it to save money.

I had a top network executive tell me this week that he believes the day of the national television "buy" is rapidly coming to an end. There are so many more ways that will save money from this huge amount that has to be spent on national television by - for commercials, where you can go through the Internet, where you can go through YouTube, and then you get the extra benefit of the networks picking up on some of this stuff, and effectively running a free commercial as news for your candidacy

You can read the whole show transcript here.

One quibble with it: the focus on the "netroots" as solely a Democratic Party phenomenon. There is a quite active conservative blogosphere, of course, though it functions differently than the liberal blogosphere in some ways. The liberal blogosphere is tightly connected to The Daily Kos, in almost a cult-of-celebrity that idolizes and repeats the themes, memes, messages and strategies of Daily Kos creater Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. The Lefty blogosphere takes its cues largely from Kos.

The Righty blogosphere, on the other hand, has no hub of similar size and influence as Kos is on the Left. There's no one dominant orthodoxy in the much more decentralized Righty blogosphere, where popular blogs run the gamut from social/fiscal/defense conservatives to a more libertarian brand of conservatism.

While the tools of the netroots - blogs, podcasts, YouTube and such - are non-partisan technological gadgets, the more centralized way the Lefty blogospere has used those tools make the Democratic netroots an easier story for the media to cover. But the Right side of the blogosphere is a vibrant story that shouldn't be ignored.

Making the Right side of the blogopshere even more interesting and, in the long run, potentially more impactful: it has much more extensive and growing linkages with conservative/libertarian talk radio. Popular conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt is a syndicated radio talker, for example, and several other conservative radio hosts have blogs, and have bloggers on their programs.

As liberal talk radio has never managed to garner a significant audience, the multi-media network effect of the conservative/libertarian blogosphere linking with conservative/libertarian talk radio is an advantage the liberal "netroots" may never match.