"I don't want to be an apologist, especially not for this zip code," said Joshua L. Steiner, co-president of the Quadrangle investment firm, as he scanned the well-heeled crowd gathered in lower Manhattan for The New Yorker Summit. Steiner, a former U.S. Treasury official during the Clinton administration, cautioned against the "temptation" to inflict pain for its own sake, or chase "speedy" fixes. Yet at this salon on Obama's agenda, Steiner is -- as conference keynoter Malcom Gladwell might say -- an outlier.

Most of the economic heavyweights here indicted Wall Street and Washington, without falling into any discernible partisan patterns.

For Internet politics, the controversial becomes conventional very quickly.

Until recently, there were heated disputes over whether political blogs had any impact on American government. While academics still debate the contours of that impact, much of the media and political establishment now seem to accept that blogs and online activism have an impact on politics. Credit the wired Obama campaign, or the media learning curve, or liberal bloggers' knack for being right and early on Iraq, financial regulation, economic populism and the Democrats' 50-State Strategy.

Whatever the overlapping factors, this Sunday's New York Times Book Review has a salient example of blogs' ascension within the conventional wisdom.

Live blogging the panel on "Navigating the New Media System" -- with new blog ventures, facebook, cliches, and, of course, debating the Dean loss...