Exactly who is Drezner's editor for this blog? I can imagine Kaus' editor is an actual editor for Slate. But isn't this a personal Blog? Is this editor Drezner's Tyler Durden?

He edits himself - or at least makes imaginary interpolations as if he did. He caught this from Instapundit. His blood cuteness level needs to be reduced by 23% to bring the symptoms into remission.

Still smarting from your little kerfuffle with Jagdish Bhagwati, I see.

BTW, I read the book and thought it was ... thin. I was expecting better arguments, because I know they're out there.

Which is why bloggers might be the best critics of them all. Bloggers, as the gatecrashers of the commetariat, are less constrained by personal or professional ties from providing honest appraisals.

That's not entirely accurate. Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and Kevin "Records" Drum have their FU traffic and they mainly need to please their viewers to keep it. However, bloggers lower on the feed chain need to suck up to those and similar bloggers to get traffic. And, some of those bloggers suck up to outside organizations like the mainstream media, the DNC, or the RNC. I've known some gatecrashers, and most bloggers just don't have it. In other words, they're little midget cogs in the machine.

At either convention, was a question asked of any of the politicians or delegates that could be considered even slightly embarassing or newsworthy? Some of that is due to their inexperience and their partisanship, but some of it is probably also due to the fact that they felt it wouldn't look good if they actually acted as an adversarial press or public.

Honest appraisals or unaccountable criticism? It's ironic to see an elite embrace intellectual populism - power to the people!

TLWB makes an interesting point. You can be adversarial and make your peers uncomfortable but the partisans happy; you can be adversarial to everyone and make everyone mad at you; or you can be just like everyone else.

Or, you can be Dan Drezner.

There is another thing about interviews and press conferences. Most politicians, following the lead of our War President, hate them. They are terrified of going off-message or seeming like they are not in control. The flip side of that is that they can be a very useful way to get a message out. I would have thought that a sympathetic blogger like Josh Marshall would be just the guy John Kerry would want to have interview him; he could say what he wanted to say in a forum read by lots of people who would talk about (and link to) it, without having that "walking bullseye" feeling Kerry seems to get in public interviews.

It may be that at this point the blogosphere has not quite arrived at the point where politicians think it can be used for something other than raising money or organizing volunteers. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before it does.

Lonewacko,

"Midget cogs in the machine"...don't know why, but this caused me to laugh, almost spilling my drink.

Had this image of the seven dwarfs, and all their cousins using bullhorns to yell at the "big people" in the newsroom booths.

Sue me, my sense of humor can be strange...

Remarkably balanced review. I expected worse from reading Kevin's blog.

Actually, Dan, Marshall has a Ph.D. in history--so his position with regard to Schlesinger might be something more like yours in relation to, say, Gilpin or Rogowski. It's the academic sphere, not the journalism sphere, that's relevant here.