typing fingers crossed

A few weeks ago I applied to cover the Democratic National Convention as a blogger. If accepted, I would have press credentials and I would blog directly from the Convention in Denver. Today, I received a followup message from the Democratic National Convention Committee asking me for more information because they are considering my application.

I know that I don't have the eyeball counts of the big blogs like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, but perhaps there is room for my, for now, modest little blog. I'd like to think that I provide keen analysis that is well-written and that one will not find elsewhere. I don't repeat what everyone else is writing and blogging about unless I think I have something particularly insightful to add to it. Like the big blogs, I do original research into Congressional hearings, judicial decisions, and United States law, not to mention my many blog entries drawing on my knowledge of Islam (and hip hop).

I've long thought that a big problem with news and political commentary in this country is the narrow range of expertise that it draws on. Turn on any news or chat show and, ten times out of ten, you will see journalists interviewing other journalists or party apparatchiks. Turn on the equivalent program anywhere else in the world and you will often see—hold on to your hats—historians, political scientists, and regional experts offering their own insight and analysis. What is interesting about watching one journalist talk to another about the election when both of them have the same knowledge, come from the same professional background, and share the same paradigms and assumptions?

I want this opportunity not just because it would be a blast to probe the convention for the angles and insights less covered elsewhere, but also because, at a time when one of our candidates is under attack for having an elite mind, I would like to show American news readers the difference that serious, rigorous analysis can make, particularly when it is written in highly readable prose with healthy dollops of wit. There is a market for what I am doing, and going to the convention can help me find it.