American Origins of Term
The first popular use of the term in its modern definition is Netroots for Howard Dean, by Jerome Armstrong in December 2002 on MyDD. Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi credits the short lived success of his then-client Howard Dean to their listening and taking the lead from netroots activity.
The netroots also played a key role in drafting General Wesley Clark into the 2004 Presidential campaign. The growing power of the netroots was seen most recently during the 2006 midterm elections. In one such instance, a volunteer for the senate campaign of Democrat James Webb of Virginia filmed remarks by then-Senator George Allen. The remarks in question, in which Senator Allen referred to the volunteer as a "macaca" (the volunteer was of South Asian ethnicity), were viewed by many as being racially insensitive. The video was posted on the popular video-sharing website YouTube. The resulting netroots attention to the video triggered a series of events that resulted in the defeat of the incumbent senator. James Webb had, in fact, been the subject of a successful netroots draft, which resulted in his entry into the Virginia senate race. Netroots activists also supported Ned Lamont in his 2006 primary victory over Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, wrote Ari Melber in The Nation magazine .
Blog writers have contributed to more than a few controversies and early netroots attention. Amongst these were the remarks made by then-Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott at a birthday celebration for then-Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dubai Ports controversy, the Mark Foley congressional page controversy, and the recent US Attorney controversy . In addition, the recent controversy regarding a Democratic presidential debate sponsored by Fox News, which the left-leaning netroots attempted to stop, ended with the debate being canceled .
In a December 2005 interview with Newsweek magazine, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos, described the netroots as "the crazy political junkies that hang out in blogs." He is also the co-author (with Jerome Armstrong) of the book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics (ISBN 1-931498-99-7).
William Safire explained the term's origin in the New York Times Magazine on November 19, 2006:
| “ | ... The Nation's Web site cited the unabashedly liberal Jerome Armstrong's praise of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "for reading blogs and being ready to work with the netroots." From these citations and a few of the million and a half others in a Google search, the word netroots has a left-of-center connotation. The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon" at the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.'" ... Popularizer of the term — unaware of the obscure, earlier citation when he used it — was the aforementioned (great old word) Armstrong on his blog, MyDD, on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to work on the presidential campaign of Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont.... headlined his entry “Netroots for Dean in 2004” and told Internet readers where to get the first inkling of a groundswell: “O.K., so Dean is still polling 1 to 4 percent nationally, so what. Look at the netroots.” | ” |
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