Obama Meets with Leading U.S. Progressive Bloggers

The President seeks to rally the troops with mid-terms just ahead. A transcript of the meeting is is here, via Duncan Black (Atrios), who was one of the five bloggers invited:

THE PRESIDENT: I thank you guys for coming in. Obviously a huge part of my base reads you guys, cares about what you do. The staff does as well. I think that what the blogosphere has done is to create a conversation that encourages activism across our citizenry, and I think that’s absolutely crucial.

We benefit from the constructive feedback and criticism that we get, and it helps hold us accountable. But you guys obviously have also done a great job holding the mainstream press accountable, and that’s really important to us.

So I’m glad that I’ve got time to sit down with you guys. This is completely open, so you guys can take it wherever you want. And what I’ll do is I’ll just go down the line, everybody gets a question, and then we can just mix it up. How does that sound?

Also attending were Joe Sudbay of AMERICABlog, Barbara Morrill (aka BarbinMD) from DailyKos, John Amato from Crooks & Liars and Oliver Willis from OliverWillis.com.

I guess that pretty much sums up most of the who's who of U.S. progressive bloggers (although the absences of Digby and Glenn Greenwald were hard not to notice). It also underlines the huge influence these leading, new media writers have in the American political sphere.

If nothing else, their collective success has provided a model that Canada's own Progressive Blogger movement could likely emulate and adapt with comparable success.

The splintering of Canada's progressive bloggers among the Liberal, NDP and Green parties notwithstanding, there remains much to be learned from our well-oiled and organized US counterparts.

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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