Today’s Stamford Times has a front page article entitled, “Blogging for Votes”. It does not appear to be online, but has some good quotes from me. Also, the Hartford Courant has Joe's Getting Blogged Down.

Watching, but decidedly not orchestrating, these bloggers is a 46-year-old Leprachaunish-looking Wall Street refugee with a puffy graying beard. His name is Aldon Hynes. He "lives on the web," as he puts it. Sixteen hours a day, scouring sites, writing comments. As an official Lamont staffer, he finds donors and volunteers nationwide on sites like dailykos.com (another source of priceless yet free Lamont help).

Hynes believes the blogosphere is reviving democracy by enabling everyday people to participate in politics on their own terms. He knows that pro-Lamont bloggers like 62-year-old Kelly Monaghan of myleftnutmeg.com (Connecticut's version of the Daily Kos, with about 500 unique visitors and 2,800 page views a day) will never follow a central line or strategy. Monaghan regaled me with criticisms of the Lamont campaign at the Naples event. Hynes wouldn't have it any other way. The idea isn't to replicate the "right-wing noise machine" that filters a central daily message to talk-show hosts and columnists and candidates across the country. It's to unbottle an anarchic, grassroots explosion of democratic participation.

The era that began with the Nixon-Kennedy debates has ended, Hynes declares.

"From 1960 to 2000 we had an era of broadcast politics," he says. "You get on TV. You get your 30-second sound bite. That's bad for the country. Spazeboy? He would have never ended up in politics. Some brilliant people have been disenfranchised by broadcast politics."

"People are starving for authenticity. People are tired of Photoshopped, airbrushed candidates," Hynes argues.

I agree. Internet politics may have the potential for even more abuse and dishonesty than broadcast politics. But unlike broadcast politics, it offers us the potential to reclaim our political system from the sell-outs and their Svengalis. That happy scenario may just be unfolding before Joe Lieberman's - and our own - eyes.