Driving The Wedge

Steve Gilliard hits on a key point about the whole King Markos kerfluffle:

The idea behind this smear campaign is to scare pols away from Kos and his community organizing. Joe Lieberman is the victim of this, and this scares people.

On its surface, the recent attacks on Markos and bloggers in general appear to be about, well, Markos and bloggers in general. But the subtext of the attacks are many. One of the biggest is that the punditocracy enjoys the close relationship it has with politicians. Its part of what gives meaning to their sad little lives.

Then along comes YearlyKOS, with its significant number of prominent Democrats making the trip to Las Vegas to wine and dine bloggers (like they have wined and dined pundits for decades), and suddenly the elite pundits are afraid that they are going to lose their exclusive relationship.

So what is one way to prevent this? Make bloggers look toxic so that politicians will avoid them instead of woo them.

Which brings us to the next iteration of this struggle: how will the politicians react to it? Will they continue to woo the netroots? Or will they take their cue from the pundit brothers and sisters and avoid bloggers like the plague?

Harry? Nancy? Mark? How about it?