With Click of a Mouse, Liberals Find Answer to Limbaugh

Could the Internet do for the left what talk radio has done for the right?

Until recently, the question might have seemed absurd. For about 15 years, a nationwide constellation of right-leaning talk-radio hosts has provided conservatives a powerful means of mobilizing their grass-roots supporters to enlist in causes and campaigns. The left has never been able to establish a competing galaxy of liberal gabbers -- or to find an alternative mechanism that can persuade and activate as many voters as talk radio.

That alternative may have arrived last week. History may record former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s unprecedented success at raising money online for his Democratic presidential campaign as the moment when the Internet emerged as a political tool comparable in strength to talk radio.

Over the last three months, Dean raised $3.6 million on the Internet from nearly 45,000 donors; last Monday alone, in a kind of electronic telethon, Dean collected a breathtaking $820,000 as supporters rushed to pad his total on the final day of the second-quarter fund-raising reporting period.

“This was a historic week, where you had for the first time an unbelievably profound use of the Internet to mobilize regular people to participate in politics again,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, an alliance of centrist Democrats. “It has changed American politics forever.”

Dean’s success doesn’t mean the left will dominate the Internet. But unlike talk radio, the Internet isn’t dominated by the right -- it offers both sides a chance to mobilize support. And right now, the left may be ahead of the right in seizing this tool’s potential.

It’s difficult to compare the audience of talk radio and the Internet. The largest talk-radio shows, like Rush Limbaugh’s, almost certainly still reach more people every day than any Internet site dedicated to political persuasion. And the Internet still isn’t available as widely as radio, which is present in nearly every American home.

But the Internet has also become a genuine mass medium. A recent study by Arbitron, the commercial rating service, found that three-fourths of Americans have access to it, nearly two-thirds in their homes.

Surprisingly, it appears about the same number of Americans regularly obtain information from the Internet and talk radio. The best data on this come from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, an independent polling organization. Its latest surveys show that 17% of Americans listen regularly to talk radio, while 15% go online every day for news.

That large talk-radio audience has proved an enormous political asset to conservatives. Through talk radio, conservative groups incited brush fires of opposition to many of President Clinton’s ideas (such as health-care reform). When Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 election, the huge freshman class proclaimed Limbaugh their “majority maker.”

Talk radio is a medium built on heat, so it’s been tougher to use it to mobilize support for President Bush’s agenda. But it remains at the center of conservative political strategies. Keith Appell, a veteran publicist for conservative causes, says his firm stays in close contact with as many as 400 talk-show hosts around the country. “For conservatives, talk radio is still the most reliable and quickest way to mobilize support,” he says.

The left has never been able to use talk radio as effectively; liberal hosts, such as Mario M. Cuomo, have flopped. Liberals mostly think that’s because their arguments are too nuanced for the black-and-white talk culture. Conservatives, more persuasively, generally believe they monopolize talk radio because their partisans feel disenfranchised from the mainstream media and have seized on the talk shows as their alternative.

Whatever the cause, there’s no question the talk audience leans sharply right; Pew found that almost half of regular talk-radio listeners consider themselves conservatives, compared to just 18% who call themselves liberals.

But those who regularly seek news on the Internet divide more evenly between moderates (39%), conservatives (35%) and liberals (23%). That balance reflects a broader realignment in political attitudes: Voters with more education have been trending Democratic (largely around social issues) for years, and a much higher percentage of regular Internet users than talk-radio fans have college degrees.

Those contrasting audiences help explain why Democrats have made more inroads on the Internet than on talk radio. Dean’s success was a milestone. But he’s building on the work of MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group that was founded to fight Clinton’s impeachment and has swelled to 1.5 million members by opposing the war in Iraq and other Bush policies.

With just six staffers, MoveOn has demonstrated that through the Internet it can mobilize at least as much grass-roots activism as the talkers on the right. Earlier this year, MoveOn generated 200,000 e-mails opposing the Federal Communications Commission decision allowing media giants to own more properties -- and, within hours, raised $250,000 to pay for ads criticizing the ruling.

Wes Boyd, the software magnate who founded MoveOn, says the Internet has already proved itself more effective than talk radio at generating contributions and letters. “When we send out an e-mail and say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ people are in an active mode,” he says. “They can click a link and do something. When somebody is watching TV or listening to the radio, they are in a passive, entertainment mode.”

Some conservative strategists privately agree. Which is why the success of MoveOn and Dean is likely to accelerate the right’s efforts to utilize the Internet as well.

It’s unlikely liberals will establish the sort of lasting advantage online that conservatives enjoy in talk radio. But by taking such an aggressive technological leap onto the Internet, liberals, for the first time, may have a megaphone that can compete with the right’s talk-radio message machine. It may turn out the liberal answer to Rush wasn’t an alternative talker, but the mouse, the keypad and the browser.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.