It's so much fun: I love seeing the Blogosphere's collective bubble burst by a shocking blast of cold, mid-western plains wind. I've posted before on how, in order to gain popularity as a blog, one needs to toe the libertarian/conservative line carefully. There's little room for dissent if you want hundreds or thousands of hits a day (of course random porn never hurts). So you tend to have a sort of collective wisdom that is only differentiated by style, as opposed to substance ("Ayn Rand rocks!" vs. "Atlas Shrugged is the best!"). Moreover, the blog is the perfect narcissistic device; those who create them tend to believe their posts are the gospel, because hell, they're smarter than everyone else. I mean, it's right there out on the internet!

Anyway, all libertarians hate Kerry and Edwards because they're aggressively liberal. They chuckle at Gephardt because he's so out of touch. Dean is just bizarre and he's from Vermont, so you know, big time liberal. As such, these candidates are written off in Democratic caucuses/primaries- something by their very nature, most bloggers will have little to no experience in participating in. Even in the face of polling numbers the line is held.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't pretend to like most of the candidates any more than the most strident libertarian - in a perfect Razor world, Lieby would get at least some notice. I also don't pretend to know more about politics than most (Eno knows it about as well as anyone, and even he can't figure it out). The point being: democrat farmers in Iowa don't have blogs (this is about as close as I could find) and they sure as hell don't read them to develop their opinions. Now it's also very telling that the media (that old liberally biased institution) also got the race wrong - or did it? Russert said this morning that 40% of the voters made up their mind in the last 3 days. This means that the polls probably were true, and while the media may be guilty of blindly following them along, it didn't inaccurately report the undercurrent. Dean had the momentum from his organization. Everyone said that Dean looked good to them. Then they actually listened to the man. At that point, anyone, even Kerry looked like a safe bet because a) he's a Vietnam guy, b) he's an experienced Senator, and c) he's from the same state as JFK. Edwards was a good second choice probably because many voters could relate to his story, as Eno points out below.