Power forward – Scott Johnson’s Power Line blog may be losing impact, but not its punch

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Scott W. Johnson isn’t likely to be startled awake by a predawn phone call. “I get up about 5 a.m.,” he says. He has to: His audience demands it.

Johnson, 59, a Highland Park native, is a corporate attorney by trade, but that’s not where he made his name: Johnson is a conservative blogger — arguably one of the nation’s most influential.

The Power Line blog that he writes every morning with fellow Twin Cities attorney John Hinderaker and Washington, D.C., lawyer Paul Mirengoff won Time magazine’s Blog of the Year award in 2004, after its reporting exiled former CBS news anchor Dan Rather to the wilderness of HDNet.

It has been an important cog in the conservative debate machine ever since. Three years ago, the National Republican Senatorial Committee named Power Line one of the nation’s five best-read conservative blogs.

However, as the blogosphere becomes the domain of bloody-shirt-waving grandstanders both left and right, the comparatively cerebral Power Line’s influence seems to be slipping: In March, it ranked 22nd among the most frequently visited conservative blogs, according to Web traffic-ranking company Alexa.com.

“I think that things have moved on a little bit,” Johnson concedes.

That hardly means Power Line has fallen mute. On June 5, Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan took Johnson personally to task for suggesting that the citizenship of a Turkish-American be rescinded after he was killed during a raid on an aid flotilla that defied an Israeli naval blockade.

“The only constant moral principle in this brand of conservatism is tribalism,” Sullivan’s blog entry reads. “There is an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ and there are simply no rules protecting those deemed outside the tribe that those inside are obligated to follow or respect.”

However accurate the portrait, it is true that Johnson sometimes willingly defies his own tribe. After closely monitoring the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate recount, he was among the few conservatives who publicly declared that skullduggery was not behind Al Franken’s election victory over Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

“The election wasn’t stolen,” Johnson says. “If Sen. Coleman lost the election — as he did — I think it was attributable to some strategic mistakes he made. And if Franken won the election, I think it was in part attributable to the doggedness of the legal support that he had.”

Johnson doesn’t mind being pointedly and sometimes brutally partisan, as demonstrated by his hard shots against the likes of U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minneapolis, and the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy charter school in Inver Grove Heights, controversial because its sponsor is an Islamic nonprofit humanitarian relief organization.

However, Johnson adds, “I hold myself to a standard of intellectual honesty.”

Some would dispute that—but not liberal Hamline University public policy professor David Schultz. “I think he is earnest and honest for the most part in what he says,” Schultz says. “I may not always agree with how he looks at the facts. But I certainly wouldn’t accuse him of being someone who is really trying to be inflammatory.”

From Mondale to Reagan

Johnson grew up a St. Paul kid. His father, Lewis, for years ran Paul’s Place, a restaurant and motel in Roseville, while his mother, Rivian, was a traditional homemaker. They raised their family at 1140 St. Denis Court, a house that Scott Johnson and his wife Sally Zusman later bought and lived in for a decade with their own children.

Johnson remembers his dad as a hard worker who arrived for work every day at 9 a.m. and got home at 11 p.m. “I’d hear the garage door opening and him coming in late at night,” Johnson says. “But he used to say that he never worked a day in his life. He loved what he was doing.”

His father also had an abiding fascination for the nation’s Founding Fathers: Lewis Johnson collected documents signed by the framers — one wall of the house was covered with them. That fascination was passed on to Scott, early on a dedicated liberal who in the summer of 1969 interned for U.S. Sen. Walter Mondale.

At Dartmouth University, however, conservative gadfly Jeffrey Hart — a young English professor and senior editor at the National Review — changed Johnson’s mind. Eventually, Johnson took every class Hart taught.

“Being exposed to Professor Hart over those four years opened my mind,” he says. “Before long I felt like I had more in common with conservatives than I did with liberals.” By 1976, Johnson was campaigning for Ronald Reagan.

Hinderaker says his partner’s scholarly approach to politics has really never changed in the nearly four decades they have known each other. “He is the classic ink-stained wretch,” Hinderaker says.

“You never see him when he isn’t hurrying along with a couple of books and magazines under his arm. It’s kind of funny that we got well-known in the digital era, because really we are old-fashioned kind of guys.”

Indeed, Johnson and Hinderaker got their start in the pre-digital age.

They began writing magazine pieces together in the early 1990s, initially designed to refute the left-leaning (and Pulitzer-prize-winning) work of investigative reporters Donald Bartlett and James Steele (then at the Philadelphia Inquirer). “That kept us going for a while,” Johnson says.

In 2002, Hinderaker invited Johnson to help him write for Power Line. It was a way to write political pieces without first having to sell them to an editor. But in the early stages Johnson says he didn’t quite get the online medium — at first he used it mainly to communicate directly with friends and family, Facebook-style.

Toward the end of the year, however, the blog gained the notice of conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt for how it published data refuting data from the Star Tribune’s Minnesota Poll, which showed Paul Wellstone well ahead of Norm Coleman in the 2002 U.S. Senate race.

Tapping insider connections, Johnson published internal Coleman polling numbers showing the race a toss-up.

What put Power Line on the map, however, was a single post, “The 61st Minute,” in late 2004. It challenged the legitimacy of documents used in a damning “60 Minutes II” report that purportedly proved President George W. Bush derelict in his duties as a Vietnam War era National Guard pilot.

Power Line eventually demonstrated that the documents were produced on a PC with modern word processing software, not a Vietnam Era typewriter as the story proclaimed.

After the Drudge Report linked to the site, Power Line was inundated with a half-million visits. The notoriety ruined the reputation of CBS News anchor and managing editor Dan Rather, and eventually cost him his job.

Johnson is proud of that moment. But the Rather episode has since cast a long shadow on the site. “The challenge after that in succeeding years has been to maintain the kind of audience that we had at that time,” he says. “That’s a very difficult task.”

Shifting sands

Though Power Line retains a solid audience base, Schultz thinks its moment in the sun has passed. In part, he says, a more boisterous and exaggerated breed of online political commentator has supplanted Power Line’s tough-but-considered style.

In effect, Schultz suggests, Johnson may be too Minnesotan for the national stage.

“The relative modesty of how Scott has approached his work might be the reason for his partial eclipse,” Schultz says. “The Sean Hannitys of the world and all of the other big movers and shakers are really more about self-promotion than they are about promoting the ideas.”

More essentially, Schultz says, the nation’s politics may have shifted beyond the center-right space occupied by Johnson and his Power Line partners. “He represents the Reagan brand of Republicanism that has been replaced by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin brand, which has different goals and objectives,” Schultz says.

Johnson declines to comment on the status of Power Line’s national impact, saying that’s better left to others.

Hinderaker is less reticent.

Power Line is not keeping up with the bomb-throwers of the punditocracy, he says, because it doesn’t have to. Despite regularly drawing 80,000 to 100,000 unique visitors a day, Power Line’s writers do not make their living from the site’s scant advertising proceeds — they have day jobs as lawyers.

The effect of that is actually liberating.

“If you look at other major bloggers, almost all of them have gone professional and are doing political commentary for a living, on both sides of the spectrum,” Hinderaker says. “I do think that there is a certain pressure to be a little more controversial, to be a little more of a bomb-thrower, to be a little more lurid and colorful. We are happily not under that burden.”

On that last point, Johnson agrees, offering a quip that harkens back to his liberal, George-McGovern-for-President days. “We’re the counterculture,” he says. “What can I say?”

The Johnson File

Name: Scott W. Johnson,

Age: 59

Occupation: Attorney

Lives in: Mendota Heights

Family: Wife, Sally Zusman, 28 years; three daughters: Eliana, 25, a writer for FOXNews in New York; Deborah, 22, a violinist graduating from Dartmouth College; and Alexandra, 17, a senior at St. Paul Academy.

Hobbies: “My hobbies are really reading and writing. … I love American popular music, from Louis Armstrong and Tin Pan Alley to Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and Emmylou Harris. My favorite venue is the Dakota Restaurant and Jazz Club; my favorite concert in the past year was Boz Scaggs.”

Proudest Achievements: Johnson cites two: A piece he wrote for the Weekly Standard that appeared in January 2007 called  How Arafat Got Away with Murder

And a piece he wrote for the same publication that appeared in October 2006 on Keith Ellison called Louis Farrakhan’s First Congressman

CORRECTION:

“An earlier version of this story repeated an error by Atlantic magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan, who erroneously criticized Johnson for a Power Line blog entry regarding an Israeli commando raid against an aid flotilla. However, the Power Line post that Sullivan criticized was actually written by fellow Power Line blogger John Hinderaker, and not Johnson.”