Jerome Armstrong (born 1964, in Los Angeles, California) is a political strategist aligned with the Democratic Party. As an American political blogger, in 2001 he founded MyDD, a blog which covers politics with an openly Democratic partisan perspective, making him one of the first political bloggers. He is sometimes called The Blogfather for having mentored many other famous bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas in their early years.

Background

Jerome Armstrong was an environmentalist activist in the late 1980's, working with Greenpeace and Earth First! in Portland Oregon, and Phoenix, Arizona; during that time, according to Salon.com, he "was arrested repeatedly at protests". He later served with the Peace Corps in Costa Rica and Sierra Leone. He also spent a year and a half at a Buddhist monastery, and served in Americorps, with the I Have A Dream program. Armstrong attended graduate school at Portland State University, and graduated in 2004 with degrees in Conflict Resolution and Applied Linguistics.

MyDD

Armstrong has said his interest in working through politics began only after the Florida election controversy following the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election. He began the site MyDD around April 2001, initially covering politics, financial markets, astrology and philosophy In June 2001, Armstrong relaunched MyDD with a focus purely on American politics.

Through 2002, MyDD served as a nexus for the decentralized netroots efforts of a blog community and, in early 2003, for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Armstrong shut down MyDD in 2003 to work on Dean's presidential campaign. After lying dormant for a year, MyDD was was re-launched with the Scoop blogging platform in March of 2004. MyDD was instrumental in online campaigning and organizing of grassroots action to elect Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee in January, 2005.

Several early contributors to MyDD became prominent in politics on the Internet. Markos Moulitsas was an early fan, eventually starting his own blog, Daily Kos. Mat Gross, creator of the blog on Howard Dean’s web-site, was another contributor to MyDD. Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, met and hired Mat Gross based on Gross' involvement with MyDD.

Political Consultancy

In January of 2003, Markos Moulitsas joined Jerome Armstrong in a political consulting partnership called Armstrong Zuniga, before being formally dissolved in December 2004. Howard Dean hired them for a time as technical consultants in 2003.

In 2005, Armstrong worked for Ohio senate candidate Sherrod Brown, and New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine. He also signed on with Mark Warner's Forward Together PAC to develop their internet strategy.

Jerome Armstrong now does internet strategy consulting for various advocacy organizations through the firm "Political Technologies LLC".

Controversy

Armstrong was a prolific poster on various stock trading websites in the late 1990's and 2000. Over events taking place in 1999-2000, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil action suit against Armstrong in 2003. In September 2003, Armstrong submitted a response to the Court in which he denied the stock touting allegations made against him in the SEC's filing. In December 2003, "without admitting or denying the allegations of the complaint", Armstrong agreed to a settlement with the SEC.

Writings

His book Crashing the Gate: Grassroots, Netroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics, co-authored by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, was released in March 2006. An Australian edition was released in July, 2006.

Replacing the Battleground Mentality with the Mapchanger Attitude in the Democratic Party

References