As victory draws near for Obama and the Democrats, a handful of bloggers are getting ready for end-zone dances - let's hope they don't jinx the results.

Still, it's a fair question: how much credit do bloggers (and blog audiences) deserve if Democrats win?

Unlike 2006, there was no "macaca moment" - a single Youtube that transformed an election, in that case Virginia Senator George Allen's expected victory. So judging the role of bloggers requires a more sophisticated analysis.

The single most important moment in the presidential campaign had nothing to do with bloggers - it was the sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 16. McCain was still enjoying his convention bounce, but when the bottom fell out of the stock market, it took McCain's campaign down with it.

Even so, McCain's campaign would not have collapsed if its foundation was intact. And that's where bloggers played a decisive role: like an army of termites, we ate through the foundation, leaving it ready to collapse.

The foundation of McCain's campaign was his "brand." The "maverick" image was part of the brand, but not the entirety of it. McCain's brand was built through a lifetime of public acts, including his time as a POW, his Keating 5 comeback, his campaign finance work with Russ Feingold, his 2000 battle with Bush, his support for the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, his enthusiastic support for Bush in 2004, and his immigration work with Ted Kennedy. It was a mixed record to be sure, but McCain's greatest asset was his infinite time on TV talk shows explaining the issues of the moment from his point of view.

McCain loved TV, and TV loved him back. Every TV host knew McCain well, and liked him. They all wanted him to show off his smarts and win.

But bloggers knew better. We knew Obama was the one with the smarts, not McCain. And we knew all of the character flaws his TV friends refused to report. It took the collective force of bloggers to force TV hosts to tell these inconvenient truths: that McCain was a Bush loyalist, a flip-flopper, a blatant hypocrite, a right-wing tool, a kept man with contempt for his wife, a cancer survivor with an uncertain prognosis, a reckless gambler, and a cranky and hot-tempered and nasty old man.

Bloggers created this alternative narrative on our own. Obama went out of his way to praise McCain's character, which drove us all nuts. Obama's praise was echoed by all his surrogates; no one involved with his campaign was allowed to dis McCain.

Fact-based sites like ThinkProgress documented all the evidence about McCain. Narrative-based sites like DailyKos drove those facts into the campaign spin. And as jamesboyce describes, creative individuals wrote and produced their own short videos and ads.

It was genuinely a collective effort - everyone did their share, and there were (surprisingly) no leaders at all.

Although we have no Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony, we are a vast and powerful movement. One can only imagine what we could accomplish if we were - gasp - organized!

Update 1: A brand-new study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows the tremendous advantage of the progressive blogosphere over our bankrupt conservative cousins - twice as many readers (as a % of our "base"), 3 times as many donors, and 2.5 times as many eventgoers. The political establishment thinks the conservative "movement" is a powerful force, but we're 2-3 times more powerful.