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.

The best benefit that blogs can provide a campaign is actually to build buzz. It provides earned media for the candidates the bloggers are supporting. It generates attention from traditional party organizations, the labor unions. And the issue groups that might not have even known that race existed and not have considered putting money into it now realize, 'OK, this is getting a lot of buzz, we're going to start putting resources into the race.' It motivates a lot of big-dollar donors to put money into these candidates.

I don't think blogs can make or break a candidate. I think they're going to be important to a certain degree. I think they can help somebody who's lesser known, somebody's who's lower down in the food chain politically. I think somebody like a Hillary Clinton doesn't necessarily need bloggers for people to know who she is and what she stands for. I think she's got all the - she's got a big enough soap box - a bigger soap box than she'll ever need that we could ever provide in the blog world.

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.

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.

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.

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.