Due Diligence

MyDD is the oldest and still one of the most innovative of the liberal blogs. It was founded by Jerome Armstrong in 2001 as a partisan Democratic Party site, and all of its current writers -- Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, Scott Shields, and Jonathan Singer -- continue to support the Democratic Party.

MyDD, along with the blogs DailyKos and Swing State Project, was the subject of an article in "Campaigns and Elections" magazine in 2005 which explored the increasingly important role blogs across the political spectrum play in raising money for political candidates. The highest-profile liberal blogs were very active fundraisers during the 2004 presidential campaign, of course, and the three named here were instrumental in the near success of Democrat and Iraq War vet Paul Hackett's special election campaign in Ohio's second congressional district in 2005.

MyDD's latest project, in conjunction with the site StartChange.org, is large-scale national polling, which began January 17 and aims to challenge what Stoller and his colleagues call "The big media companies and politicians," who, according to MyDD, "like to poll using biased questions that reflect their agendas."

MyDD's concern is well placed. For example, if pollsters ask voters whether they "approve of the way George W. Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism" (as an ABC News poll recently did), and 53 percent answer in the affirmative, then proponents of the Iraq War and NSA spying can proudly assert that the "people" have "spoken" and that the war and illegal spying on Americans will continue with their "approval."

"Our poll will be different," declares the MyDD/StartChange page which announces its launch. "We want our poll to be independent. We want a poll that asks the tough questions and gets real answers."

MyDD is soliciting its readers to send in the kinds of questions they would like to see asked in a national political poll, and is also asking for donations to help defray the project's costs.

This sort of interactive approach is typical of MyDD, which like DailyKos is a fully interactive blog. Registered members are invited to submit essays known as diaries, which are listed as they arrive at the site on the right-hand sidebar of the main page. A few are promoted to the status of recommended diaries based on positive responses from the readership, and the main page writers choose what they consider the best diary submissions and feature them on the main page.

In recent years MyDD has remained influential mainly on the strength of the high quality of the writing and research of the main contributors. However, it has lost some ground to the newer and more combative Democratic blogs such as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's DailyKos and the gay activist John Aravosis's Americablog, possibly because it's less shrill than the newcomers, and retains the flavor of a newspaper's editorial page.

If MyDD's polling gambit is successful, however, it will remain in the forefront of influence and prestige among the liberal blogs.

"Due Diligence" is a legal term, also known as due care, which refers to the usual everyday efforts made by ordinarily careful people to avoid harming others. Failure to make this effort is considered negligence, and exposes the careless or deliberately malicious person to a window of liability. Therefore, the curious name of this blog is actually a warning to readers about the nature of the current government, with the authors implying that they would be remiss in their responsibility if they didn't issue such a warning to the general public.