I think there's very many paths to a nomination, and they don't all necessarily go through the bloggers. I don't think we, as bloggers, are all important. I don't think that we can make or break a candidate. I think we are a component, we are a piece of a larger piece of a puzzle. And so, no campaign is going to be able to have it all. No campaign is going to have all the money it needs, or all the media it needs, or all the staffers it needs or all the blog attention it needs. They're going to have various pieces, and there's more than one way to get to the nomination.

What goes wrong in Washington, D.C. I think some senators and congressman and media people go to Washington, D.C., and they get sucked into this vortex and they lose touch with what's happening out in the rest of the country. That's the problem. If these elected officials refuse to lose touch with their constituents, if they spend more time outside D.C. than inside, if they spend more time talking to constituents rather than pandering to the D.C. elite press corps, I think they're safe.

I don't necessarily have any designs in being in politics for the rest of my life. I don't necessarily think that this is the best thing for our country to have an environment so polarized that the political discourse is this aggressive and this nasty. I don't think it's a good thing. But until we see a sort of backing off from the Republicans that have created this environment, I don't see a reason why Democrats should hold off and act any differently.

One of my rules is I generally don't talk to elected officials. It's kind of a firewall. I'll talk to staff if they have something of interest. I try to avoid talking to politicians altogether. I mean, to be honest, I don't really find them that interesting. If I want juicy information I talk to staff of the politicians.

I think there's very many paths to a nomination, and they don't all necessarily go through the bloggers. I don't think we, as bloggers, are all important. I don't think that we can make or break a candidate. I think we are a component, we are a piece of a larger piece of a puzzle. And so, no campaign is going to be able to have it all. No campaign is going to have all the money it needs, or all the media it needs, or all the staffers it needs or all the blog attention it needs. They're going to have various pieces, and there's more than one way to get to the nomination.

Now, I went into the Army as a Republican, I came out as a Democrat, and it completely changed my outlook on a lot of things. And when you live side by side with your fellow soldiers and you realize that they're not a number, that they're actually human beings and they have families, it's a lot harder, I think, to talk about sending them to die for things that aren't really that important.

The fact is that there's hundreds of thousands of incredibly motivated, active political partisans working on the blogs. These people generate buzz, it generates local activism. These aren't the kind of people that pay attention a little to politics, turn it off and then do something else. They live and breathe politics. And anybody that wants to build a movement or a successful campaign needs people like the people who read blogs.