Bronze Trinity has created a master piece that could attract the attention of the Obama camp. It is in place waiting for one just one moment that will send it into history during Obama Campaign. And anyone that follows politics knows something is going to happen. Jonathan Chait writes:
Most political activists can point to one catalyzing event, an episode in each of their lives (or, more often, in the life of their country) that shook them from their complacency and roused them to change the world. You can find many such stories if you troll through the netroots, the online community of liberal bloggers that has quickly become a formidable constituency in Democratic politics. But the episode that seems to come up most often is the Florida recount. For instance, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong's book, Crashing the Gate, the closest thing to a manifesto of the netroots movement, begins like this:
Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side. That was the spark. Fed-up progressive activists began organizing online. Fueled by the new technologies--the web, blogging tools, internet search engines--this new generation of activists challenged the moribund Democratic Party establishment
Who are these bloggers? My bet is none belong to the Afrospear:
The netroots harbor a similar anti-Washington populism and, like the conservative movement, have set about creating alternative institutions and social networks. Some of them--such as Media Matters, which monitors conservative bias in the news, or the New Politics Institute, which promotes innovative approaches to organizing--are based in Washington. (Neither is a creation of the netroots, but both are closely allied and hire bloggers as fellows.) Others are virtual. The most important of these is an e-mail list called Townhouse. It includes "many bloggers and other representatives of the netroots as well as a large number of partisan journalists and grassroots groups," Moulitsas has written, and its purpose is to "have a unified message in the face of a unified conservative noise machine."
The party-line sensibility that pervades the netroots is not some artificial, Stalinist imposition. The close ties that exist among the netroots and its allies grow out of the technology they use so naturally. As insular as elite Washington may be, the netroots' world is arguably more so. The leading liberal bloggers all know one another and generally regard one another as friends, or at least allies. The countless smaller liberal bloggers may not inhabit the same social circles, but the nature of the form encourages them to share the same political sensibility. After all, if you are a new liberal blogger, your only way to escape total anonymity is if larger, established blogs point readers to your site. E-mail feedback and reader comments tend to be uniformly partisan as well, reinforcing the path of least resistance.
Even Matthew Yglesias, who writes one of the most independent-minded liberal blogs, confessed in March that he had soft-pedaled his opposition to gun control. "I don't write about this issue much because, hey, I don't want to be a wanker," he wrote. "Wanker" is the netroots equivalent of the conservative term "squish"--an expression of derision reserved usually, but not exclusively, for ideological defectors. It describes behavior that, for liberal journalists and policy wonks who came into politics a generation earlier, was a badge of honor.
Francis Holland writes about being banned from a site. This is one reason why it is important to grow the Afrospear.
h/t to African American Political Pundit.
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