* (please note that this piece was actually intended to be the first part of a two-part story; the second part was published in the print version of The Daily on Friday, Feb. 1: http://thedaily.washington.edu/2008/2/1/selling-their-wares-in-marketplace-of-ideas/)

At Victor’s Coffee in Redmond, the whirring of the cappuccino maker clashes with the cheerful sounds of jazz music. This cash-only, mom-and-pop coffee spot is where hip Redmondites meet to warm up on wintry days.

It’s also where 20-year-old Andrew Villeneuve is busying explaining how he’s going change politics in the Northwest.

He sits near the window, wearing a baggy sweater that matches the gray sky. A black moustache clings to his upper lip. Speaking with the zeal of a revival preacher, he’s a true believer in the power of the “netroots.” It’s clear that he simply enjoys talking, mostly about his blog. His waves his hands excitedly, punching the air to punctuate his many points.

“It started out as a little idea,” he says, with obvious pride, “and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

The “it” is the impressively named Northwest Progressive Institute. It’s essentially a liberal blog and online think tank for young democrats, or progressives, as Villeneuve prefers to call them. Launched in August 2003, when he was 17 years old, the web-based portion of the nonprofit institute consists of a blog, an interactive page of links to other like-minded blogs and a resource page.

Villeneuve, a student at Bellevue Community College, says he wants to create a practical think tank. His group is more than just a blog and consists of political activists working to turn their policy dreams into reality in Olympia. But their blog is how they broadcast their message.

Villeneuve represents a new breed of left-leaning political bloggers in the Northwest. Newly energized, confident and eager to influence the vote, the bloggers who inhabit the local blogosphere (a term first coined in 1999 by William Quick) are opening bigger stands in the marketplace of ideas, hawking their wares to whoever will stop and listen.

But exactly how much influence they exert is still up for debate.

Although the local blogosphere has been active since the late 1990s, its presence wasn’t really felt until the war in Iraq and the 2004 presidential elections turned the casual readers of political news on both sides of the spectrum into avid writers. This was especially true in Seattle, where the majority of bloggers lean to the left.

Although liberal bloggers’ enthusiastic support for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean did not propel him to the White House in 2004, they are quick to claim credit for the Democratic gains in Congress during the 2006 mid-term elections.

They are also quick to dismiss questions about their independence from the Democratic Party.

Villeneuve said his blog and others like it are designed to make their adopted party better, and claim they are not beholden to it. Others insist they are fiercely independent.

Veteran political consultants say this independence can either help or harm their candidates, because bloggers circumvent their usual means of getting media messages out.

“I’m frustrated as hell with the rise of the blogosphere,” said Christian Sinderman, a local Democratic consultant. “Blogs, for me, are this weird nether region…it’s usually stuff that’s not quite good enough to end up printed somewhere, but it’s not quite nothing enough to end up going into the ether.”

They can be used as a dangerous political weapon, especially when they publish a rumor that can distort reality.

“There’s no editing, there’s no journalistic structure, but then it sort of gets a life of its own, and then it sort of takes off and makes it into a print version,” Sinderman said.

Political veterans like Sinderman aren’t shy about using blogs to their candidates’ advantage. The blogosphere can become a powerful fundraising and message machine in its own right.

This was illustrated in local liberal bloggers’ reaction to an Aug. 27 fundraising visit to Bellevue by President George Bush on behalf of U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, which netted about $185,000 for the Republican congressman from the 8th District.

According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, liberal bloggers responded by raising some $123,000 over that weekend for Reichert’s opponent, Darcy Burner. Burner, a former Microsoft manager, attempted to unseat Reichert in 2006 but lost with 48.5 percent of the vote to Reichert’s 51.5 percent.

The last-minute fundraising effort in August for Burner was titled “Burn Bush for Burner” and drew about 3,200 individual donors from around the country, said Burner’s campaign consultant Sandeep Kaushik. It was coordinated and organized by some of the nation’s most popular liberal blogs, including DailyKos.com and firedoglake.com.

“They tend to be partisans, no question about that,” said Kaushik, a former writer for Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger. “At the same time, they’re not part of the party structure.”

Their role in the public discourse is still largely undefined. “They kind of play this weird role that has this superficial semblance to journalism,” Kaushik said.

But for all their potential, it’s easy to get carried away by bloggers’ self-perpetuating hype. “There are a lot of overblown statements about the ‘power of the blogosphere,’” he said.

While they may not be tools of the party, they want to help elect certain kinds of democrats, namely, progressive populists who care about issues that matter to them, such as ending the war in Iraq, providing universal healthcare and promoting environmental initiatives that include bans on clear-cut logging and stronger restrictions on development.

A recent example of the bloggers’ influence can be found in Ned Lamont’s 2006 campaign for U.S. Senate against Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. Lieberman ran as an independent after he lost to Lamont in the Democratic primary. Lamont, a wealthy entrepreneur, had the backing of the liberal blogosphere for his strong anti-war stance. But after a tough, freewheeling political fight, Lamont went on to lose to Lieberman, 39 to 49 percent.

As a pressure group on the Democratic Party, Kaushik said bloggers push their own agenda, and that doesn’t always agree with the party leadership, combining elements of a political movement with the behavior of a traditional constituency group. He points to Lamont and his candidate’s campaign as examples of the bloggers’ limitations.

“They’re not at the point yet where they can really swing a race,” Kaushik said. His challenge is keeping Burner from becoming too closely associated with the local liberal blogosphere, which overwhelmingly supports her. “Part of my job is making sure people know the blogosphere is not the campaign,” he said.

[Reach reporter Will Mari at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]