Sobering advice to Democrats with a blogging problem

Memo to aspiring Democratic candidates: The blogs can be a good first martini. Don't let them be your second.

As a first martini, left-wing sites like dailykos.com and mydd.com can lift the spirits of a new candidate. They boost confidence and raise some quick campaign cash. These blogs are good for democracy and Democrats, because they force the party to open its primaries to promising outsiders.

As a second martini, though, the blog can be a real problem. All that enthusiasm and love can cloud a candidate's political judgment. The contender starts thinking that these kids represent more voters than they do — and is sucked into left-wing dogma that doesn't play well in the bigger-than-Berkeley world. Even good liberal stances get dressed in a rhetoric that's unbecoming.

After the second martini, a blog-besotted candidate can get sloppy. The hopeful spends too much time around the blogosphere regaling the congregation with what it wants to hear. The Republican foe makes sure that America's bus drivers, janitors and data processors hear the vaguely (or at times overtly) anti-American tone that emerges from some of the radical "critiques."

A good candidate can be ruined by that second belt of bloggers. Howard Dean was one.

The Dean who entered the 2004 presidential campaign was a pragmatic centrist — the very sort of Democrat who could win a national election. As governor of Vermont, Dean was rather conservative. He held down social spending, much to the annoyance of many liberals.

Dean wasn't keen on gun control and once said that if welfare mothers "had any self-esteem, they'd be working." He signed Vermont's law legalizing civil unions between gay partners, but reluctantly.

All that changed when Dean ran for president and started the first "net roots" campaign. The left-wing blogs embraced him, raising both money and his national profile. But instead of visiting the blogosphere as a friendly tourist, Dean went native. Before you knew it, he was transformed into a latte liberal and proceeded to lose the nomination to the ineffective John Kerry.

We don't want that to happen to Ned Lamont, who is challenging Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary. The blogs have turned the Greenwich entrepreneur into a serious contender, and bless them for that. But now things get dangerous. Lamont is running a television ad in which he is joined by jubilant young supporters, including the DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas, who mugs at length for the camera. That's cute, but stop right there.

Lamont is the best kind of liberal candidate. He's for universal health coverage and all the other good things, but comes at the issues from a sophisticated business perspective. It's not healthy for his campaign to become overly identified with the hothead dramatics and childish expletives of the lefty blogs.

Lamont's opposition to the war in Iraq has become a signature counter-Joe-Lieberman issue, and he articulates his objections very well. But he's already being simplified as "anti-war": read "pacifist."

He's not. Lamont says he was all for the war in Afghanistan, because it had harbored the terrorists who attacked us — and we went in as part of a multinational force. He opposed the Iraq war because it was based on faulty assumptions, it was unilateral and it foreclosed diplomacy. He notes that his position differs little from that of Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush's national-security adviser.

"I don't have to point to Tom Hayden to show people what's wrong with this," Lamont told your writer.

These important distinctions will get muddled if the ultra-left starts explaining Lamont, rather than Lamont explaining Lamont.

Establishing distance from the more radical sites will be tough, because the blogs are feeling very important these days. But it must be done. The Democrat who parties in the blogosphere needs this advice: Partake of that first toast, then leave the premises.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com