Boston Globe article highlights "liberal"blogs,gives huge space

The next round of prospective Democratic presidential candidates, even those with centrist credentials, is actively courting the Democratic Party's left wing -- which speaks loudly through its blogs, enjoys rising fund-raising clout built on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and is imbued with a confidence that it can build on Republican disarray. The Democrats are rushing to fill a void left in the hearts and minds of many liberal activists by New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's efforts to move to the center, particularly on the Iraq war.

''It's very important for them to know we'll fight for their beliefs," Edwards, a former vice presidential candidate, said of the party's liberal activists. Having run in 2004 as a moderate who supported the Iraq war, Edwards is busy building a large base of support on the left.

Liberal Democrats have long played a powerful, though not always determinative, role in choosing the party's presidential nominee. And after Dean, a centrist as governor of Vermont, rose from obscurity by moving to the left and tapping into Internet-fueled anger at conservatives, candidates are scrambling to court a wing of the party that's even more organized and flush with cash than in 2004.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, creator of the million-visitor-a-day DailyKos.com, calls Senator Clinton ''irrelevant," because she's not viable in the minds of progressives, while Anna Burger secretary-treasurer of the politically influential Service Employees International Union, contends that Clinton ''has serious problems. . . . Is she going to articulate a position on Iraq and for working families?"

Jerome Armstrong, founder of the popular leftist blog MyDD.com, has joined Warner. Many of Armstrong's colleagues in the blogosphere support Feingold, a longtime hero on the left for his stance against the Iraq war and his lone vote against the USA Patriot Act in 2001. This week, Feingold called on the Senate to censure President Bush for approving domestic wiretaps on American citizens without a court order.

The antiwar stance of Wesley Clark, a retired general and former NATO supreme commander, has made him a popular pick among bloggers.