Claire McCaskill has an appropriately short and effectively sweet response to Matt Bai's disapproving take on Twitter's growing popularity in Washington politics. Hitting politicians for inane tweeting is something like pointing out that there's a lot of junk on the Internet. But McCaskill's using those tiny bursts of text, she says, to drive conversations in the directions she'd like to see them go. What's more, that obsessive itch of "I really should be tweeting this" is actually beneficial in McCaskill's case, because it reminds her to communicate on a human level with the Missourians she represents. Besides, she's having fun. "As I tweet about work and even the mundane parts of my life, " she writes, "I have a smile on my face." That's not nothing. The best politicians tend to be the ones who enjoy the gig the most.

First Maureen Dowd writes a (justly parodied) silly diss of Twitter, and now Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Times Sunday Magazine, offers his own misreading of Twitter's importance for politics. Like many inside the Beltway, Bai focuses on the handful of DC insiders who have begun using Twitter to share details of their day--some inane, some intimate and some genuinely illuminating. But to him, this is most like former Senator Bob Graham's obsessive compulsive diary-keeping: "just plain weird." He adds, "it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s."

I guess some of the smart kids in the mainstream media just refuse to learn something new until you spell it out for them. So here's a note to Matt Bai and the other big-foot journalists who are dismissing Twitter...

Over on the demurely-named Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, New York Time Magazine political writer Matt Bai has a review of Matthew Hindman's new book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy." Hindman's argument is that rather than democratizing politics, the Internet has actually boiled the American political system down into an even more pungently elite, white, and over-educated reduction. The New York Times dominates a greater share of the media market online than offline. The roster of top political bloggers is even more "elite" than the elitist press.

Reading Hindman's book, it's tough not to recognize that he's conflating metrics on whose jabber gets listened to online with the much wider world of civic engagement, from social activism to political organizing. And Bai uses Netroots Nation organizer Gina Cooper as a counter example; a former Georgia teacher, Cooper became a leader in the online left through the power of her own words and actions. Generally though, Bai's otherwise sympathetic to Hindman's argument, writing "To suggest that the voices of 100 or so prominent bloggers of similar pedigree represent some new, more inclusive voice of the American everyman–which is what the bloggers themselves like to profess -- is just fantasy."

Still, Bai's eager to cover his bases: "Digital democracy isn't necessarily a myth. It's just not yet a reality, and those are two different things."

Colin Delany's comments on Matt Bai's recent NYT article reminds me of so many conversations I have had about how Google killed message control. For a long time, I have argued that campaigns cannot control their message anymore. At best they can only hope to manage the chaos.

But as a result of a recent conversation with my friend Lenny Steinhorn, I am convinced that the internet has not killed message control, but rather language control. Campaigns may still be able to shape the message, but citizens are free to internalize it and restate it in their own language. And with the internet, any campaign's message is able to take root in the polity, in many forms and with greater impact.

Google the words “DailyKos” and you’ll get about 2.6 million results. Google the words “Democracy Alliance” and you’ll get about 44,000 hits, and from them you won’t find out much. That's why I'm writing to praise journalist Matt Bai's new book, The Argument.

Jose Antonio Vargas reviews Matt Bai's The Argument; according to CBS Evening News, the majority of Americans still get their political news from the newspaper; the Huffington Post/Slate/Yahoo "Mashup" debate was viewed by 1.1 million people, but how many actually participated?; a new website attempts to bring together all of the candidates' stands on issues but is missing important features; and more on William Beutler's critique of Googlebombing.

Profiling the passions and energies of Ron Paul supporters; buzzing about Matt Bai's "The Argument"; seven post-Labor Day questions about the presidential race, plus a few suggestions from us; and catching up with Mitt Romney's create-your-own-ad contest

The open-sourcing of debate planning; the debate on the online Right; the demographics of the online Left; the ongoing decline of newspapers; another exploitative video; and whose website is winning the most attention...

The bigfoots of the press were all in Chicago this past weekend for YearlyKos, and they churned out lots of coverage. So did the littlefoots of the web. Plus, Ron Paul beats Barack Obama on YouTube!