As I was pondering the Bush/Obama transition today it occurred to me that this is really going to be the first one of the blogging era. To be sure sites like Moveon.org were around in the late 90’s and did play a role in the 2001 changeover, but it really was not until 2004 and 2008 that blogging became a major factor on the net.
This made me wonder how the more ideological sites/blogs will handle the change and in that arena I suspect the left leaning blogs will have a harder time than their conservative brethren. For the last 4-8 years the basic message out of the left blogs have been that pretty much everything that is bad stemmed from Bush and/or the Republicans. A secondary message was that if only the Democrats were in charge that things would be better (or in some cases a bit more than better).
Now that all of this has come true the bloggers want they will have to shift into the position of supporting the administration and the Congress in passing legislation and running the country. Of course for a time they can keep blaming any failures on Bush fallout but with strong numbers in Congress it will be tough for them to blame the GOP for ‘blocking things’.
I am not sure that they will be able to do this (and indeed some of the more hard line left blogs have simply shifted blaming the GOP as evil to blaming the Democrats as weak).
The right leaning blogs on the other hand have in many ways already made their transition. Many started attacking Bush and the GOP a couple of years ago so for them it’s not as much of a change (Polipundit.com for example has not been big Bush or Republican fans of late). Of course some of them are still in pro Bush mode and so for them there will be a shift but it won’t be as big of a shift as it will be on the left where I don’t think you had any pro Bush sentiment.
A somewhat similar problem might be faced by the pundits but they have had a couple of transitions already (1993 and 2001) so they are somewhat more experienced at things. The Limbaugh/Coulter/etc extremists were already pretty anti Bush but they are moving quickly into the anti Obama mode.
On the left the Olberman crowd will have a bit more of a shift in moving from anti-Bush obsession to support for Obama though they may take the same route as the more radical blogs and either continue to blame Bush or attack Obama for not being liberal enough.
But it will be interesting to see how the bloggers shift from the outside to the inside and vice versa.