The liberal blog community just had the limits of its power defined. I expect the argument about whether the Alito cloture vote represents an improvement over the Scalia vote or an embarrassment will continue for some time. Either way, a lot of it was about the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the aisle, the conservative blog community has decided to set up their own power-defining moment. The Republican members of the House vote for their floor leader on Thursday; it’s a three way race between Roy Blunt, John Boehner, and John Shadegg. Shadegg is the reformer. RedState wants Shadegg, Glenn Reynolds is making non-endorsement endorsements, and so on.
It’s an interesting narrative, since endorsing Shadegg is a tacit admission that DeLay was corrupt and that he represented a corrupt culture. It’s going to be more interesting to see if Shadegg wins. I really don’t have any predictions; I don’t have any sense of how influential the conservative blogs are. (Or vice versa; RedState is run by professional Republican political operatives, and cannot be honestly characterized as a grassroots blog.)
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