Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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McPolitics

Monday June 30, 2003

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TRAVELOGUE ALERT: The Mullmeister Moves On to Kuwait tomorrow. The average daytime temps for the week are forecast to be between 116 and 118. The rates are cheaper this time of year.

While the Left continues to whine about the lack of media outlets under its control, it is interesting to note what happens when one of the outlets it DOES control attempts to make news.

MoveOn.org is an unabashed left-wing website which was started during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. Its name comes from the founders' urging people to move on - past - the minor contretemps of President Clinton which have helped Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham to command an $8 million advance for her "gasping for breath" autobiography.

By the way, as of yesterday afternoon, Living History had dropped to number seven on the Amazon.com list of best sellers. If you take out Harry Potter and the other fiction titles, Hillary had still slumped to fourth behind Ann Coulter's book, a book on how to help your kids do better in school, and the South Beach Diet book.

On Sunday, Bill Clinton Rodham wrote an essay (pause for derisive laughter as the concept of the former President actually writing anything on his own - including his own book - sinks in) about the horrors of the FCC's recent decision to change the ownership rules of American radio and television stations.

Putting aside for the moment that the piece was in Saturday's New York Daily News and not Sunday's New York Times, Clinton compares going to McDonald's rather than a neighborhood diner, to the concentration of ownership in the media rather than locally owned and operated radio or television stations. The result of the FCC's action, he said would be "McMedia."

Hey, maybe he DID write this himself.

Moving on to MoveOn.org's recent adventure: The website got a great deal of attention by announcing that it would be running the first-in-the-nation on-line straw poll the results of which were to be released this past Friday including a lengthy Howard Kurtz piece in the Washington Post the morning after the two-day poll concluded.

The media, while not exactly breathless about it, gave it more than enough attention as if a poll, on the internet, seven months before the first ACTUAL primary, among a Democratic field which is probably not yet completed, would mean anything; Nothing more than McVoting.

MoveOn.org announced that if any candidate received over 50 percent of the votes, they would gain the endorsement of the group along with the fundraising and volunteer force which would come along with that endorsement.

Not surprisingly, Howard Dean won with about 44 percent of the votes cast. But former Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich came in second thus taking the wind out of any semblance of legitimacy in this exercise.

Oops. Kucinich? Second? MoveOn.org? What's that?

MoveOn claims some 1.4 million members. Let's take that as read. Let's also take as read that those 1.4 million members have a far greater interest in politics - Democratic politics, liberal Democratic politics - than the average American citizen.

If the MoveOn.org poll was truly the breakthrough activity we had been led to believe, then we might have expected a high level of participation. With one of the Left's major websites offering this kind of an opportunity, we would not have been surprised to find very close to 100% participation.

According to the site's official results some 317,600 people participated in the straw poll. That means the "turnout" for this poll was something under 23%.

If less than a quarter of the activists who are members of MoveOn.org - even after being alerted via e-mail that this poll was taking place - bothered to participate; and if about a quarter of those people voted for a backbench candidate like Dennis Kucinich, then what does that tell us about the level of enthusiasm even among Liberal activists for this crop of candidates?

It tells us that the whining about the Left about the lack of media outlets for their political point of view rings hollow again.

Voters on the Left had the chance to champion their favorite candidates on their favorite website and they didn't care enough to do either.

McPolitics.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Lot's o' Lists. Links to the almost unreadable Clinton Daily News piece, the very readable Howie Kurtz piece, the poll results, the Amazon.com Top Ten, and a chart of the daily high temperatures for Kuwait this week.

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