Today's New York Times Magazine has an article by Matt Bai about the upcoming YearlyKos convention, "Can bloggers get real?" The heart of the article is Bai's argument that

politics is, by its nature, a tactile business. New technology may change the way partisans organize and debate, and it may even spawn an entirely new political culture. But at the end of the day, partisans will inevitably be drawn to sit across the table from the candidates they support or oppose, just as votes will still be won and lost in banquet halls and airport hangars and all the other seedy, sweaty stalls of the political marketplace. Online politics can't flourish in the virtual realm alone, any more than an online romance can be consummated through instant messaging.

That's because politics, like dating, is as much about the experience as it is about the winning or losing. Whether we're talking about the reformers of the progressive era or the immigrant ward leaders of the urban heyday, 1960's antiwar protesters or 1980's religious conservatives, new political movements have always evolved, ultimately, into thriving social networks.

I can't argue with Bai's view that the significance of online politics is inextricable from its real-world manifestations. Opportunities for face-to-face interaction have certainly proven to be among the most compelling incentives for drawing people into online communities, whether that community is a group of Dean supporters or a group of avid knitters. And many of online politics' greatest victories are when web sites and e-mail campaigns have succeeded in driving people into the streets, whether that's the recent role of MySpace in driving turnout to immigration rallies or the much earlier example of e-mail helping to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and turning the WTO's Seattle meeting into the "Battle of Seattle".

But I don't think that the continued significance of offline politics lies, as Bai argues, in the tactile gratifications of direct encounters with political leaders. As Bai puts it

As these social circles congeal, their members will inevitably want to share hugs and handshakes with their political leaders, too, rather than merely threads and diaries. The advent of television didn't change this visceral aspect of choosing our icons, and neither will broadband.

Is a two-second handshake in a crowd of thousands really more satisfying than the opportunity to comment on a candidate's blog -- and hear back from the candidate herself? Is a crowded national convention a more compelling encounter with one's fellow political travellers than a small niche gathering of the twenty people in your own community who share your commitment to building bike paths?

The Internet has created opportunities for dramatically different kinds of political interactions, both on and offline, and if the success of DailyKos shows anything, it's that the demand for new kinds of political interactions remains radically unfulfilled by conventional political organizations. Yes, organizations will succeeed in tapping the political power of the Internet to the extent that they can channel that power back into real-world actions and decions. But that won't happen by assuming that folks who have tasted the personal impact of blogging and online organizing will be satisfied by a handshake and a beer.