Daily Kos Eating Itself Over Keith Olbermann’s Departure

What happens when two liberal giants collide? Countdown host and liberal opinion leader Keith Olbermann wrote what netizens call a GBCW (Good-Bye, Cruel World) post at Daily Kos Wednesday night, touching off a blizzard of blog posts and comments at the left’s leading online community. The uproar is understandable, but also damned entertaining. Pop some Orville Redenbacher, pull up a chair, and check out some of the highlights.

Right off the bat, let me say that although I disagreed strongly with Olbermann’s assessment of President Obama’s Oval Office Address, I couldn’t agree more with his Kos blog post. At issue was a comment from a DailyKos diary that contained a yellow assertion:

can’t verify, of course… (2+ / 0-)
but a friend in the news biz tells me he got a damaging e-mail from one of his pals at NBC.  something to the effect that their anger was pre-planned because “beating up on the President has been good for ratings.”

I haven’t checked but I’m hearing that Olbermann slammed the speech on Twitter before it even started.

This might seem trivial to some, as it came from a blog commenter, the most anonymous, least weighty breed of online personality, but the Kos community is different. Long before he tried Twitter, Keith Olbermann has been very good to them, not merely showing up to dispense famous-guy pearls, but actually engaging and establishing a relationship with them.

While there are a lot of legitimate criticisms you can make of Keith Olbermann, his bona fides as a committed member of the progressive “team” are pretty damn solid, and the commenter’s premise makes little sense, anyway. From whence is Olbermann supposed to be poaching these viewers who want to see him tear the President apart? Are there Fox News viewers who are one rant away from abandoning Sean Hannity in favor of Keith Olbermann?

The reactions on the blog are pricelessly predictable. Keith has his defenders, of course, and there are two separate posts with the trailblazing headline “Dear Mr. Olbermann,” one pro, and one con. There’s the obligatory mockery of the GBCW post, along with snarky poll, the “your show sucks anyway” post, a must-read effort that posits Barack Obama as Martin Luther King to Rachel Maddow’s Malcolm X (Malcolm X!), and one post with a headline that actually warned Keith not to let the door hit him on the way out. President Obama is about to deploy Thad Allen to Daily Kos to see if he can plug the gusher of cliche´s. They finish it off with a blog post about a Politico story, reporting on Olbermann’s blog post. It’s so meta, I think it caused a temporal paradox, because I don’t remember having these gills.

The common thread between all of these reactions, however, is that they all illustrate what’s so unique about the relationship that just ended. Many bloggers will write about a famous public figure with a familiarity that suggests the subject will actually read it, but in this case, he actually might. It’s a level of engagement that’s hard to find.

The marriage between Keith Olbermann and Daily Kos is a valuable one, though, far too valuable to throw away so easily. Neither of them really “needs” the other, but they are definitely better off together than apart. I don’t think this separation will last long.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.