The Battle for America 2010

At this very moment, the SS America, our ship of state, is steaming headlong toward Europe as if it were on a mission to fuse itself with the old continent and its values.

Can it be stopped? Will our country return to the principles on which it was founded or continue on course to become Sweden without meatballs or France without croissants?

Stand by, Mr. and Mrs. America. You’re going to find out in November.

And Pajamas Media and PJTV — the PJ Team — will be there. In the background — while you’ve been surfing, barbecuing, and generally kicking back (okay, we’ve been doing some of that too) — we’ve been planning our election coverage.

We’re going to call the coverage The Battle for America 2010. Too melodramatic? We don’t think so. As almost everyone agrees, 2010 will be one of the most epochal elections in the history of our country — a battle for America, indeed.

So how are we going to do it? We’re not a big media company with tons of employees (many of whom are being offered buy-outs anyway). We are a small group. But our roots in the blogosphere and the tea parties give us some inkling of how to put boots on the ground.

Towards that end, through the good offices of our editors, we have put together local correspondents in several of the key battleground states. As of now, those are Maryland, Colorado, Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, Kentucky, and Virginia. You will see the first of their reports on this page today.

The objective is for these correspondents to provide us on-the-ground coverage as only local people, familiar with the issues and peculiarities of their states, can. Some of these correspondents, armed with Flip cams and other instruments of the new guerrilla television, will soon be appearing on PJTV with video coverage to compliment what you are reading here on PJM.

The aim is for the correspondents to fill the gaps in the coverage being provided by the mainstream media. What are the trends? Are the tea parties really making an impact locally? Where are the bodies buried in the campaigns? Who’s being called a racist and why? What do we do about the corruption of our system? Is there any hope to redeem it?

Our team welcomes your suggestions on how to deal with these and other questions and how to cover the election in general. We’re new at this. All of us are, because a citizen approach to reporting is new — or new again.

So help us out and join the party. That ship is sailing.