What does Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa mean for the prominent activist bloggers in the Democratic Party who call themselves the “netroots” – many of whom have spent the past year either dismissing Obama’s candidacy (MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong scoffed at Obama’s “fake self-proclaimed ‘movement’” in June) or being actively hostile to it (a common enough sentiment that it led the DailyKos poster with the puckish sobriquet “Mark Warner Is God” to write a sarcastic post titled, “Barack Obama will eat your children”)?

“Here’s a dirty little secret that the liberal blogosphere will probably try to flush down the memory hole in the coming weeks – they didn’t like Barack Obama,” writes The Weekly Standard’s Dean Barnett. He later adds, “Obama incurred the wrath of the progressive blogosphere, and good God, a miracle occurred – he won anyway.” Barnett then writes:

Obama showed indifference or even hostility to their agenda. His success reveals the liberal bloggers’ lack of king-making ability. This particular emperor has no clothes.

A progressive blog-reading audience of roughly 100,000 people has alternately enthralled and frightened the Democratic party for a couple of years now. Obama either saw that foolishness for what it was, or was sufficiently committed to his principles that he refused to pander. If he paid a price at the Iowa caucuses for this “gamble,” it was one he could afford. More likely, he paid no price, as the progressive blogosphere is deeply unrepresentative of the Democratic party rank and file. We learned that much last night.