Andrew Ratner in the Baltimore Sun, February 10, 2008:

When Red Maryland, a conservative blog, offered up its endorsements recently, it broke down how its contributors made their choices (including one who was "anyone but McCain") and published their comments. It was a little more transparent than the united front that newspapers like to project in their political endorsements - even if, behind the scenes, publishers and editorial page editors many times don't see eye-to-eye on politics.

In traditional media, the sausage-making of endorsements is rarely acknowledged or seen, except in a rare case like last week, when Cheryl L. Reed resigned as editorial-page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. She was upset by higher-ups' rewriting - although not changing the outcome - of the paper's endorsements of Barack Obama and John McCain.

Maryland's a blue state, but you'd hardly know that from the blogosphere, where conservative bloggers appear to outnumber those who describe themselves as liberal or progressive.

Ouch, that f-----g hurts.

Grudging but honest and warm congratulations to Red Maryland.

It's true of course: the Maryland blogosphere is on net red-handed, right-handed. Andrew Ratner should have given some exposure to Free State Politics, though I could forgive his oversight of this blog. But Ratner noticed what I have noticed for a long time: the red blogosphere is deeper and broader than the blue one here, perversely. Particularly strong in Anne Arundel County, a purple county that has been trending increasingly red of late. The fact that red bloggers are doing so well is not necessarily a critique of blue bloggers so much as perhaps a testament to red bloggers' commitment and enthusiasm for the medium. But still.

Multiple red bloggers in Maryland (Greg Kline, Brian Griffiths, Jimmy Braswell and others) put out multi-media content in audio or even video - routinely. No blue blogger in Maryland, including myself, does that; though I have explored doing so with audio, there is a world of difference between exploring and executing. Hats off to those gentlemen from across the political and philosophical divide; even doing a crappy job of that, let alone a well-produced one like Greg Kline's Conservative Refuge, takes a lot of effort and aggravation. And many other bloggers like Streiff and Mark Newgent of Red Maryland and Michael Swartz (whom I took to task a bit a couple weeks ago, but whose corpus of work remains dauntingly impressive) hit hard and regularly.

If you take the Maryland Blogger Alliance blogroll, remove the non-political sites that focus on nature or sports or the like and run a count, conservative blogs outnumber liberal ones maybe 3 to 1. This in a state wherein Democrats outnumbered Republicans almost exactly 2 to 1 as of three months ago and the same ratio last month (thick .pdf file), and wherein the ratio for the state's wealthiest, presumably most educated and tech-savvy county, Montgomery County, is more like 2.25 to 1 favoring Democrats. There's no excuse for us to be underperforming 4,5,6 to 1, even granting red bloggers their due for effort and focus.

This is not to suggest that red bloggers haven't had their squabbles amongst themselves. Out of courtesy I won't rehash them here but we liberals at least have for the most part not managed to shoot each other down. I don't know any liberal bloggers, for example, who are going to the mattresses for Al Wynn in MD-4. Nor have we had any progressive inter-blog squabbles, to my knowledge. Isaac Smith and I, for example, don't agree on economic issues, at least not all the way down the line, but his disagreements with me on such issues have been expressed with courtesy and with a focus on the policy issues at hand. Perhaps because we are small in number, we have been able to duck that challenge of political growth: in-fighting.

Well, what do we liberals/progressives do about it? One is to sit on our asses and drink root beer. Another is to do something positive. One thought that I have had was to sponsor a Blue Blogger get-together to get some media exposure. Then again, that could just wind up being an excuse to drink root beer together, though political success has followed from some such meetings in the past.

More on some concrete ideas to come in another post.