Democrats’ sorrows in Appalachia aren’t new. But the party’s decline in Buchanan County, Va., which is tucked into the corner where the commonwealth bumps into West Virginia and Kentucky, is a prime illustration of how Democratic fortunes in the region have fallen off a cliff since the 2008 election.

The hills in Buchanan (pronounced BUCK-an-an) are forbidding and seemingly random, unlike the endless spines of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Viewed from above, the topography looks like crumpled paper. “It’s not easy to get into or out of Buchanan,” says Tommy Morris, Virginia’s Education secretary and a native of Galax, a town about 100 miles to the southeast. “There are only three major roads going in and out, and it’s not the kind of county where you could drive around it in a circle. You’d have to leave and come back another way.” The fog that cloaks every hill and hollow only adds to the sense of isolation.

Buchanan’s livelihood has always been coal. In 1990, at the peak of coal production in Virginia, Buchanan produced 45 percent of the state’s total, tens of thousands of tons. At that time, the United Mine Workers of America had an iron grip on the county — its culture, its lifestyle, its economy, and especially its politics. The UMWA, the de facto regional Democratic machine, helped Bill Clinton take 63 percent of Buchanan’s vote in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, even though he didn’t win the state either time.

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When Karl Rove set out to get George W. Bush reelected in 2004, he targeted the Expedition-driving, megachurch-attending, Panera-eating, McMansion-living voters in places like Loudoun County, Va. Bush won Loudoun with 56 percent on his way to a comfortable victory statewide.

On Tuesday, Republican Bob McDonnell will also win Loudoun on the backs of similar voters. These are fairly affluent voters who are new to the state and, most important, don’t have any strong party affiliation. They want efficient government but otherwise don’t have much time for or interest in politics.

McDonnell’s victory in Loudoun and in neighboring Prince William County will come as a surprise to many armchair pundits, who thought that all of Northern Virginia had became solidly blue. Many die-hard Democrats will blame Creigh Deeds’s lifeless campaign and the political environment.

But the truth is that Northern Virginia is often taken for granted as a powerful Democratic bloc. To be sure, Fairfax County has become solidly blue, but Loudoun and Prince William counties are more accurately full of independents who just happen to be supporting Democrats recently.

The last time they supported a Republican, in 2004, Bush promised these voters that he’d keep them safe and keep their taxes low and then pretty much stay out of their lives. This was a winning message, and he beat John Kerry by 10 points among Virginia’s self-identified independent voters.

But by 2005, it was clear that the GOP was managerially inept and had reneged on its promise of streamlined government. When residents of Loudoun were worried about schools, national Republicans were concerned with the fate of coma patient Terri Schiavo.

In the governor’s contest that year, Jerry Kilgore ran ads about the death penalty and abortion when these voters were stressing about overcrowding at Loudoun Valley High School and traffic on Route 7. Recognizing this, gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine distilled his campaign message into two words: roads and schools.

Then-Sen. George Allen’s “macaca” meltdown in 2006 didn’t help win these voters back. In 2008, Barack Obama’s pledge of post-partisanship was well-received in these counties, which, by that point, had seen staggering home foreclosure rates and wanted government to return to bread-and-butter issues.

Obama even made a point of making one of his first campaign stops in Bristow, Va., which one study recently concluded had the longest commute in the nation. Ironically, many would-be rally attendees never made it: They were stuck in traffic on Interstate 66.

Instead of continuing this momentum in 2009, Deeds fell into the same trap that Kilgore had four years earlier: He emphasized the cultural rifts between his opponent and suburban and exurban voters. He made McDonnell’s controversial master’s thesis the centerpiece of his campaign.

Granted, if a pollster in a controlled environment asked voters if they agreed with many of the points in the now-infamous thesis, a majority would not. But making an opponent’s views on social issues the central theme of a campaign is not a winning strategy.

McDonnell, on the other hand, avoided social issues at all costs, despite his obvious history of divisive stances. He trained his message on the economy and jobs and ran ads featuring his suburban, middle-class family. His slogan was “NOVA’s own Bob McDonnell.”

Deeds, on the other hand, came across as a Bath County good old boy. This isn’t to say Deeds should have tried to be something he’s not, but appealing to “forgotten” voters and playing up Deeds Country play a lot better in Abingdon than they do in Ashburn.

Deeds won in the primary because voters became frustrated with the same tired, trench-warfare politics of Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran. He mostly stayed out of their crossfire and won Loudoun and Prince William counties by focusing on substantive rather than silly issues in the primary.

But in the general election, he’ll lose these counties. It’ll be the sixth straight statewide election in which whoever wins Loudoun and Prince William wins the commonwealth. These counties are the state’s new swing vote. They’re also the face of the new affluent, educated and independent Virginia.

When Andrew Jackson roamed the hills of the Carolinas, northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee, it was still frontier, and for generations the southern Piedmont remained economically and culturally isolated.  Today, however, Old Hickory might be surprised to learn what this area has become.

Atlanta, a railroad junction with a few thousand souls before the Civil War, is now home to the nation’s busiest airport.  It’s also headquarters of several global companies, including UPS, Home Depot and Coca-Cola, which BusinessWeek recently ranked as the most valuable brand worldwide.

Within a couple of hours is Charlotte, the nation’s No. 2 banking hub; Raleigh-Durham, a booming biotech center; and the Piedmont Triad, home to a handful of Fortune 500 companies.  Even Upstate South Carolina, still somewhat underdeveloped, has the highest foreign investment per capita in the nation.

The region following I-85 from Raleigh-Durham to the Piedmont Triad to Charlotte to Atlanta is quickly becoming a “megapolis.”   To be sure, a lot of this area is still poor, and the region doesn’t have the accumulated wealth of its financial rivals in the Northeast Corridor.  Nor is its economy as robust as its southern siblings in the Texas Triangle.

But the southern Piedmont is growing rapidly.  Georgia is slated to gain two seats and North Carolina is projected to gain one after congressional reapportionment, and two of the top ten fastest-growing congressional districts are in the Atlanta and Charlotte suburbs. Both states rank in the top five for net domestic migration, and South Carolina is in the top ten.

Companies are drawn by the affordable cost of living, relatively cheap labor markets, and low corporate taxes.   North Carolina also has some of the most liberal banking laws in the nation, which explains its flourishing finance industry. But bigger economic and cultural factors are at work.

“Do not underestimate the potency of the elimination of Jim Crow segregation laws,” says Ferrel Guillory of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.  “Once that millstone was lifted, it liberated the South economically as well as socially.  Corporations, which weren’t going to invest in a region of racial division and strife, did so once legal segregation was removed.”

At the same time, modernization was crucial.  Interstates opened the region to the rest of the nation, and air conditioning made hot southern summers bearable.

The region’s universities also played an important role.  “The Research Triangle, of course, was founded on the idea that big research universities would serve as catalysts, and they did,” says Guillory. “Atlanta, too, has a critical mass of universities that enrich both the public policy and the economic development of the region.”

Atlanta marketed itself as the “city too busy to hate,” but a more accurate description, according to UVA’s Larry Sabato, is that it is the hub of a “megapolis too busy making money to worry about history.”

Consider the case of Hugh McColl.  McColl was born in the hills of Upstate South Carolina, not far from where Jackson himself was born.  He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and later joined North Carolina National Bank, which through a series of aggressive acquisitions became NationsBank.

Under McColl’s leadership, NationsBank later merged with Bank of America. He then took what the Wall Street Journal called “a scrappy Southern outsider” and built it into the nation’s second largest market capitalization.

McColl is the personification of both the old and new southern Piedmont.  He had the same competitive, “scrappy” attitude that Jackson and many of the settlers in this region had.  “So Hugh McColl does indeed have antecedents,” says Michael Barone.

But McColl also attended one of the best universities in America, and entered into banking at a time when North Carolina was liberalizing its laws and the region was modernizing.   Later, he was one of the 49.9% of North Carolinians – a plurality – who voted for Barack Obama for president,  a reflection of the new southern Piedmont.

As the region grows, expect it to take on more of an identity to similar to McColl.  This doesn’t mean that it’ll mirror his politics, but it does mean the region will be a more complex place, both politically and economically.  The southern Piedmont will always have it roots in bootleggers racing stock cars through the muddy hills, but these days Charlotte is the kind of city where NASCAR meets the NASDAQ.

“We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?’”

A more accurate description probably wouldn’t have been that the GOP has too many southerners, but that it doesn’t have enough non-Southerners.  As Ron Brownstein noted in the National Journal in May:

The Republican Party today is more electorally dependent on the South than at any point in its past. Today the GOP holds a smaller share of non-Southern seats in the House and Senate than at any other point in its history except the apex of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popularity during the early days of the New Deal.

It may be a vicious cycle where the loss of moderate northern Republicans opens the doors for the rise of the Tom DeLay’s of the party, who in turn pave the way for the defeat of more moderate northerners.  The same cycle played out in the 1980’s and ’90s when the loss of Dixiecrats enabled liberals to take power of the Democratic Party, and thus prompted the death of more southern Democrats.

Even Voinovich’s Ohio, once the bedrock of the Republican Party, has shifted to the Democratic Party in recent years despite having little gain in minority and/or suburban voters that have turned other regions (mid-Atlantic, Mountain West) blue.

Voinovich is retiring in January 2010 and probably doesn’t care about popularity points in his caucus, so he’s not going to win any friends south of the Ohio River for that comment.  But he is correct that his party increasingly speak with a southern accent:

[Chart credit: National Journal]

Here’s the problem with their analysis: The term “Sun Belt” refers to a region that spans from San Jose to Baton Rouge and from Cape Hatteras to Albuquerque, but the only things that culturally unite Scottsdale to Vero Beach are spring training and old people playing golf.

I understand that the authors are writing the obituary for the real estate Ponzi schemes of Phoenix and Florida, but writing off the entire so-called Sun Belt is ham-handed at best.  After all, which city is doing better, Austin or Akron?  Which will make a quicker comeback, Charlotte or Cleveland? And perhaps most importantly, which states are gaining seats in Congress after redistricting?While some areas of the Sun Belt are certainly looking gloomy, here’s a more accurate regional forecast:

• The Southwest, as defined by the cactus golf course states, is indeed looking dark and stormy;
• The Southeast, as defined by the states with SEC schools (plus NC), has a partly cloudy outlook, with the exception of Florida, which has Cat 5 economic hurricanes bearing down on it;
• And in between Dixie and the desert, Texas looks positively sunny.

Southwest. It’s a total mess out there. “You can make a strong case that the California dream is all but dead,” wrote Californian Joel Kotkin recently. “The state is effectively bankrupt, its political leadership discredited and the economy, with some exceptions, doing considerably worse than most anyplace outside Michigan.”  For the first time since the Golden State was admitted to the Union in 1851, it will not be gaining a seat in Congress after the 2012 reapportionment.

Arizona will likely gain two seats, but it’s not doing too much better. The state’s economy was built on a “growth for the sake of growth” ethos, and so when prices dropped 40% in a matter of months, the economy fell off a cliff faster that Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. “An economy like Phoenix is like a shark – it can’t stop, it can’t even run slow,” noted Andrew Kirby in a recent column.

Southeast. “The South is much better poised to recover than it would have been a generation ago,” Ferrel Guillory, director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, told me over the phone recently.  In white-collar jobs, Charlotte is the nation’s No. 2 banking center and Triangle rivals Boston as the nation’s biotech hub.  In blue-collar jobs, Tupelo will start producing the Prius soon and Talladega cranked out 800,000 Benz’s last year.  The seaboard South was “marching briskly into the new economy” before the recession hit, according to Guillory, and is well-positioned to rebound.

Florida, on the other hand, is the sick child of the South and has been hit by home foreclosures as hard as the southwest. St. Pete’s Times reporter Adam Smith, who I consider the best political writer in the state, thinks the recession will have political ramifications. “Most observers had long predicted Florida would gain two or even three addition congressional seats with reapportionment,” Smith recently emailed me. “The slow down in population growth could mean Florida gains just one seat.”

Texas.  Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, McAllen, and San Antonio were all listed among the 20 strongest cities in Brookings Institution’s recent report tracking the recession in America’s 100 largest metro areas.   What’s more, Texas is set to gain a whoppin’ four seats in congressional reapportionment!

This map from Daily Yonder shows that most counties in the Lone Star State are either holding their own or actually improving.

So while pockets of the Inland Empire are crumbling and real estate in Ft. Myers is falling, it’s foolish to write off a region that stretches from Orange County, Florida to Orange County, California.

Click here for a bigger map

A few interesting points:

• Talk about a base - In Criegh’s home county and three surrounding counties - Bath, Allegheny, Highland and Rockbridge - 4398 votes were cast. 4091 were for Creigh.  In all of Highland County, for example, Moran got only 3 votes while Creigh received over 1200.
• Creigh won Clinton voters - Remember the Obama-Clinton map where Clinton won everywhere west of the Blue Ridge and Obama won the urban crescent? Well, it’s clear that Creigh won many of those same Clinton voters.
• Dissecting the Obama coalition - Creigh will have no problem winning the Prius drivers in Arlington and Alexandria who are true blue Dems and lovingly supported Jim Webb despite some conservative views. What Creigh needs to worry about is the other leg of the Obama coalition - African-American voters in Richmond, Southside and Tidewater.
• Terry won the black vote - Terry won a plurality in Bobby Scott’s district that stretches from the Seven Cities up to east Richmond. I remember Terry’s early ads were at the Newport News shipyard, and he later visited Hampton with Will.i.am. He needed to do really well there, not just win a plurality.
• Don’t sleep on C’Ville - Charlottesville and Albemarle are major bastions of liberal Democratic votes. The fact that Creigh’s state Senate seat covers these communities gave him a strong start in this crucial pocket.
• The WaPo effect - Most armchair pundits think Creigh won because of his Washington Post endorsement. In reality, Creigh locked up downstate voters with cheap TV ads early and only contested NoVA once he got the endorsement. He wasn’t scheduled to appear at the VA FREE lunch until he won the WaPo nod, and his signs cropped up virtually overnight up here.
• A balanced ticket - My sources tell me that Gov. Tim Kaine is psyched about the geographic balance of the ticket - A Gov candidate from the hills, an LG candidate from the Beach, and an AG candidate from the NoVA burbs.  Republicans, for their part, also boast a balanced ticket with VA Beach, Richmond and Fairfax County all represented.
• What about NoVA? - For the second gubernatorial election in a row, both parties elected candidates from outside NoVA.  So will the ad wars be fought in Roanoke, Richmond and Hampton Roads, or will they spend the big money in Washington?
• The Clintons just don’t play well in VA - Bill Clinton never won Virginia, despite taking a number of border states, including West Virginia and Kentucky.  Hillary got smoked here. And Bill’s right hand man Terry ultimately failed.  Maybe those Clinton robocalls hurt more than they helped?
• The engine of VA - Virginia’s economic success has a big part to do with the booms in Fairfax, Loudoun, Price William and Henrico counties - Creigh won all of these, just like Kaine did in the ‘05 general and Obama did in the ‘08 general.

So how will Creigh Deeds stack up against Bob McDonnell?  That’s the subject of another post, but it’s clear that the map is going to be dynamic and scrambled and that the battlegrounds will be constantly evolving.  NoVA, which accounts for one out of every seven votes in Virginia, is obviously the big prize, but Deeds will certainly try to make inroads in McDonnell’s base in Hampton Roads and we can bet on McDonnell going for the F-150 Democrats in Creigh’s neck of the woods.  Let the games begin.

Murray noted that Sotomayor hails from the poorest congressional district in the nation and one that gave Barack Obama a whoppin’ 95% of its vote in 2008!  And Solomon, in his fascinating column “What the Bronx Would Bring to the Bench,” implies that her “gritty upbringing” is unique among justices and can tell us something about her priorities and concerns.

Soundview subway stop (compliments of jag9889)

But when you think about it, won’t Sotomayor’s urban background be consistent with the current leaders of the U.S. government?  It’s been widely noted that Barack Obama is the nation’s first “urban” president. He’s spent all of his adult life in the old-school cities of Chicago, New York and Boston.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a product of Baltimore and the representative of San Francisco, two classic American cities.  And Vice President Biden feels most at home on the Metroliner.

In many ways, Obama, Pelosi and Sotomayor embody urban America: Among the three, there is a black man, a white lady and a Latina (and Obama’s CoS is a Jew).  They also have backgrounds in both strains of American urbanism - poverty and rich elite, or Anacostia and Georgetown - that top demographer Joel Kotkin has identified.  Obama cut his teeth on the rough South Side, but later lived in Hyde Park, where “black and white are united against the poor.” Pelosi’s family came from gritty Baltimore, but she is the embodiment of a rich San Francisco liberal.

Obama in Chicago

Regardless of their economic place in life, they are city-dwellers through and through, which is a major contrast to the previous administration.  George W. Bush, although a faux Texan, was one for the country and embraced his home on the range.  VP Cheney was an energy baron from Wyoming.  Ex-Speaker Dennis Hastert hailed form the Illinois Prairie.  And for a consistent comparison, Bush’s most prized SCOTUS appointment, Chief Justice John Roberts, grew up in a small Indiana town.

Bush in Texas

I think we’ve already seen how this shift in the background of our leaders has affected the priorities of the U.S. government.  The lion’s share of federal stimulus money has gone to national banks and automakers, the bedrocks of New York and Detroit, respectively.  And unlike FDR’s New Deal, which fueled rural development operations like the Tennessee Valley Administration, Obama’s new New Deal has prioritized urban projects such as high-speed rail.

I think the nation is somewhere in between these two administrations, both politically but also geographically.  We’re a suburban nation – a plurality of Americans live in the suburbs and suburbs are the key swing vote.  Obama couldn’t have won the presidency without winning Wake County, N.C., and Orange County, Fla., or making gains in Hamilton County, Ind. I grew up in Fairfax County, Va., which voted for GWB in 2000 but gave Obama a seven-point victory in 2008.  Whichever party can win over these voters and emphasize their priorities holds the keys to long-term electoral success.

First, let me give my thoughts on the primary. With his official residence here, Romney will be a constant presence in the Granite State the next four years and won’t have to explain to those pesky reporters what he’s doing up there. As the former governor to a neighboring state, Romney has high name ID and the local Republicans will probably embrace his desire to flee Taxachusetts (as many of them have probably done).

However, if Romney does win the primary, I don’t think it gives him much of an upper hand in the general election. New Hampshire is probably gone for Republicans for good. Granite State Republicans controlled both houses of the state Legislature from 1911 to 2006 and controlled at least the governorship or Legislature from 1876 to 2006. As recently as 2004, they had two U.S. House and two U.S. Senate seats. These are not temporary whims, they are tectonic shifts.But at the same time, some things never change in New Hampshire. It’s a state of “entrepreneurs and high-tech innovators,” according to the Almanac, and is prosperous and “skeptical of government programs.” This sounds like the ideology of Romney he got tangled up in the purity tests of the culturally conservative wing of the GOP. It sounds like the beliefs of Mitt Romney, the CEO of Bain Capital and the Olympic Games.

Romney’s move not only solves his ideological identity crisis, but also his geographic one. He grew up in Michigan, went to school and ran the Olympics in Utah, managed Bain and governed in Massachusetts, and has a vacation home in New Hampshire. So what does he tell people when they ask where he’s from?

In an article early in the primary process in 2007, Jonathan Martin wrote about candidates like Romney who are national figures rather than politicians with local roots. Barack Obama (Hawaii, Indonesia, Ivy League, Chicago) John McCain (Virginia Beach, U.S. Navy, Arizona) and Hillary Clinton (Chicago, Arkansas, The White House, New York) are other examples. “These are the candidates from nowhere — or everywhere,” he wrote.
For Romney, Martin observed:

Romney arguably has a more solid claim on his Massachusetts ties. Despite his Michigan roots and undergraduate work at Stanford and Brigham Young University, Romney came to Cambridge for a joint MBA/JD in the 1970s and stayed. Still, there was no lack of buzz about his seeking office in Utah after he took over the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune in 2001, Romney acknowledged his desire to run but appeared conflicted about where to launch his political career. Somewhere between the “geographical poles” of Utah and Massachusetts, he said vaguely when asked in which state it would be. He’ll underscore the point next week when he makes his official announcement — at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Mich.

In New Hampshire, Romney seems to have found an ideological and geographic home that suits him. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him launching his 2012 campaign from the heart of the Granite State.

Tom Brokaw recently penned a column in the New York Times suggesting that this recession is an opportunity to press the reset button and that one aspect we should focus on reforming is the efficiency of government. Specifically, Brokaw suggests that state governments could save billions by consolidating municipal governments in the way that Miami-Dade, Nashville-Davidson or Jacksonville-Duval have merged services.

He points to a New York State study from a few years ago that concluded that “New Yorkers could save more than a billion dollars a year by consolidating and sharing local government responsibilities like public security, health, roads and education.” Brokaw also suggests that North and South Dakota, which are home to 17 state universities combined, could get “a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions… with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards.”

I like Brokaw’s reasoning.

But the folks at the rural blog Daily Yonder bring up some good counterpoints. They suggest that big government is not always more helpful or efficient (true) and that the cost of administration rises when geography expands. West Virginia, for example, spent millions closing small schools and consolidating education systems, but now faces the burden of busing some students over an hour to their schools and hiring more officials to deal will the challenges of massive school districts.

“Small towns aren’t big spenders,” notes Daily Yonder blogger Bill Bishop. He notes that North Dakota has about the same amount of counties as California, but that North Dakota is running a surplus while California has a 13.6% budget gap. Message: While consolidation might streamline the big government bureaucracies of the Empire State, it’d be solving a problem that doesn’t exist in small town America.

I think both Brokaw and Bishop have good points, and I actually think that the real solution lies somewhere in the middle. Let me give you two examples. I went to school at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. The city of Schenectady runs an independent municipal government within the county of Schenectady. Both are fraught with crime, corruption and unemployment, although the problem is particularly pronounced in the city of Schenectady, which is a classic Rust Belt collapsed town.

There’s been talk of consolidating the two, which would likely save millions on police and eduction. But county officials don’t want the city’s problems, and city officials don’t want to relinquish power to the county. And so the community decays.

Now, move your attention 400 miles down the coast to Arlington, Virginia, where I live. Arlington is a geographically small county nestled between the District and booming Fairfax County. Arlington has its own schools and police independent of Fairfax and is doing just fine. In fact, it’s doing great. It’s been named the most educated community in the nation and was rated “one of the best places to [ride] out the recession.” It has its own cultural identity independent of the District and Fairfax. It would make no sense to merge.

So here’s the solution: Struggling governments, such as New York State and some in the Rust Belt, ought to merge in the same way that General Motors is streamlining. I don’t mean to hold up GM as a model of efficiency, but the motor company used to have seven brands with seven networks of dealerships, and is now consolidating. Schenectady city and county should combine. Maybe Baltimore city and county should consider it, too.

Communities that are prospering, such as Arlington, or even running a positive balance sheet, such as North Dakota, should probably keep serving their citizens and business the way they are now. Don’t shutter the local courthouse and throw a wet towel on hometown pride, and don’t force two happy and independent entities into an awkward marriage.

Of course, the big problem here is that all politics is local. If powerbrokers aren’t interested in surrendering their lifeblood, they’re probably going to do everything they can to stop it. But if that hurdle can be overcome, consolidation is an interesting choice for more efficient government.

And that’s the model that bloggers should be looking toward.  Instead of focusing on building up enough traffic to post ads that clutter the page, compromise the site’s aesthetic and bring in enough money to cover Friday night’s bar tab, bloggers should rather use their site as one big advertisement for themselves.  Use it as a place to demonstrate your savvy, skill and experience in a way that will attract the magazine editors, consulting companies and TV producers with the fat checkbooks.

Consider the case of Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine.com.  In a post last year, he explained that BuzzMachine has generated “$9,315 from two blog ad networks, $1,866 from ads on RSS feeds, and $2,674 from Google ads, for a total of $13,855.”  Not a bad haul.  But he’s also parlayed the blog into speaking gigs, consulting jobs and a book deal. “The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine,” Jarvis wrote.  “If I add that all up over the past five years and five to come, to me the blog is worth a few million.”

Jarvis’ level of income (and self-praise) is one that few bloggers match, but many use this same strategy. Barry Ritholtz, who writes The Big Picture, is particularly adept at leveraging his blog for media appearances. As his site notes, “Ritholtz is a regular guest on Kudlow & Company, Power Lunch and Fast Money” and “has guest-hosted Squawk Box on numerous occasions, and also appears regularly on Bloomberg, Fox, and PBS.”  All of these TV hits serve as a branding mechanism for the Maxim Group, a bank that manages $5 billion in assets where he serves as Chief Marketing Officer.

Similarly, Joel Kotkin, who writes at New Geography, uses the site to post interesting stories about shifting demographics and political geography.  Kotkin will often infuse stories with statistics gathered by the Praxis Strategy Group, where he serves as a Senior Consultant.  When he’s not writing for New Geography, he’s an editor for Inc. Magazine and frequently pens columns for publications ranging including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, arrangements that all pay nice freelancing checks.

Kotkin, Ritholtz and Jarvis are at the top of their respective fields, but aspiring bloggers can just as successfully parlay blogging into bigger enterprises.  A friend of mine was approached by a new media company and major media publication because of his blog.  He now earns a salary from that company and a regular freelance check from that publication.  He says that the $1500 he’s made from ads on his blog is a small fraction of the opportunities that can be attributed to his “virtual branding resume,” or blog.

The main fact is that ads can pay, but shouldn’t be a blogger’s main focus or goal. “Social media content production results in an influence platform, not a passive advertising doormat,” wrote Brian Clark, author of Copyblogger, recently.  If more bloggers thought this way, we might see fewer cumbersome ads and fewer bloggers complaining about “trying to find time to blog.”  They’d recognize it’s the most promising business model, and we might see more bloggers scoring those greenbacks.