In Crashing the Gates: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, Jerome Armstrong (creator of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zunigas (creator of Daily Kos) describe how Republicans excel at 21st century political strategizing, and how Democrats do not. They also tell us how a new breed of activists on the Left is already addressing this dilemma.

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In Crashing the Gates: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered
Politics (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT, February, 2006) Jerome
Armstrong (creator of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zunigas (creator of Daily
Kos) describe substantively and in detail how Republicans excel at 21st
century political strategizing, and how Democrats do not. They also tell us
how a new breed of activists on the Left is already addressing this dilemma.

Setting our across country in the summer of 2005 to talk to people about
political process, they discovered (1) a Democratic party dominated by
"single issue camps" unwilling to compromise in order to achieve effective,
focused strategy; (2) "consultants that are allowed to profit without
performance"; (3) an "infrastructure of think tanks and training centers and
media outlets" operating according to old fashioned assumptions; and (4) a
party hierarchy committed more to maintaining their status than to
accomplishing necessary goals. "Instead of helping the new candidates by
weeding out the incompetent consultants, the Democratic party continues to
thrust the same tired, old, unsuccessful consultants on new campaigns every
cycle. It's a veritable revolving door – jobs abound, win or lose, as long
as they are part of their clubby D.C. clique."

Following are excerpts from the book in the order they appear, indicating
specific areas of the authors' focus. Each of these areas is well developed
and documented.

"Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through
non-democratic 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."

"Both of us started our blogs because we wanted a voice in our nation's
politics. We had hundreds, then thousands, of readers, as we somehow tapped
in to a greater need for strong progressive voices -- voices that had been
shut out of the corporate media outlets…. Our sites grew in size and
influence. Daily Kos is now the largest political blog in the world by a
factor of three or fou8r. Jerome's MyDD is one of the most influential
political blogs in the nation."

"If only we could say, 'To hell with the Democratic Party!' But part of
the present American reality is that we live in a two-party system, and the
Democratic Party is our only alternative. It's efficient -- and expedient
-- to reform the existing party of the left, much as the conservative
movement took over the Republican Party in the 1970s and converted into the
electoral powerhouse it is today."

"The Democratic Party stands for everything, yet stands for nothing. It's
a gaggle of special and narrow interests, often in conflict with each other,
rarely working in concert to advance their common causes. Members of each
group -- environmentalists, pro-choice activists, civil libertarians,
plaintiff's attorneys, and so on -- promote their agenda above all others
and show little or no understanding of the larger progressive values they
share with the other groups. And so the whole is never really greater than
the sum of its parts."

The 'Democratic Party coalition' of the past few decades has failed. It
must be replaced by a new progressive movement, one that is dedicated to
finding those common bonds that tie us together while tolerating the sorts
of differences inevitable in any 'big tent' gathering. And that movement
needs to remain outside the party, giving Democratic candidates the freedom
to get elected in all parts of the country without being smeared by
association with any particular interest group."

"Unless there's a groundswell of opposition to business as usual, the
Democratic Party's campaign machinery, with its ever-i8ncreasing inflow of
money, will continue to function and lose as it has lately. The whole
situation is one hell of a fix. The candidate needs money, but to get the
money, he or she needs a strong connection to the party apparatus.... The
party wants assurances that the money is being spent wisely. It needs
people in each campaign who will feed critical information from the inside.
The consultants step in to fill that role."

"Instead of helping the new candidates by weeding out the incompetent
consultants, the Democratic Party continues to thrust the same tired, old,
unsuccessful consultants on new campaigns every cycle. And why not?
Candidates come and go, their fate decided by voters, but insider D.C., the
consultant class and the party officials move on to the next election and
more business. It's a veritable revolving door -- jobs abound, wind or
lose, as long as they are part of their clubby D.C. clique."

"The key to effective advertising for Democrats is not only to get beyond
the corrupt commission model of media saturation, but also to find more
creative ways to reach the audience that is watching less and less broadcast
television and getting its news and entertainment more and more from new
media. The next challenge in campaign messaging is to stay ahead of the
curve when it comes to using new media to target specific audiences with the
messages that will resonate with them. In this area, too, the Democrats
need to shed the old ways and embrace the new."

"Perhaps the biggest difference between the way Democrats and Republicans
communicate with voters, besides the more sophisticated used of technology
and data, was that the Republicans have been targeting all voters --
Republicans, Democrats, independents -- and doing it all year long, not just
in the last weeks of an election."

"Even some of the large donors are beginning to recognize the problem of
accountability and of overpriced consultants. The Rappaports have been
incubating activist groups that merge technology with politics rather than
giving money directly to the party committees."

"Never has one of those dreaded PowerPoint presentations brought more
notoriety to a man than Rob Stein's did, mainly because it was the first
time anyone had quantified and mapped the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC)
and graphically shown the enormity of the challenge before the progressive
movement"

"In fact, what conservatives have built over the past thirty years is
nothing short of brilliant. We can admire it the way we would admire the
precision, engineering, and craftsmanship of a stealth fighter. That no one
even compiled the data on the VRWC , and got the information to the right
people until Stein did it in 2003 is an indictment of its own. That the
Democratic establishment didn't react to the rise of the VRWC was virtually
criminal."

"A whole new generation of reformers -- from the online world of the
netroots, to new multi-issue groups, to new labor, to new big-dollar donors
-- is engaged in a two-front war: battling to knock Republicans off their
perch while jostling for control of the Democratic Party."

"Campaign finance reform was the first skirmish between reformers and the
comfortably numb establishment, and once the bill became law, it upended the
established order of the political world. But no one saw it coming. Not
until an unknown governor from an obscure New England state burst onto the
national scene."

"Dean's campaign was an altogether new kind of campaign -- it wasn't about
offering a list of 'policy fixes'; it was more about creating a broad-based
populism that energized the base by giving it voice in a national forum, and
it was about boldly fighting Republicans, not imitating them. Using tools
like Meetup.com, his merry band of bloggers, and the relatively new service
unions like SEIU and AFCSME Dean built an army of foot soldiers that far
outnumbered anything his opponents could muster…. The Democratic Party had
never seen anything like it before. The party, which was struggling to
survive because of its gross inability to compete with Republicans on the
hard-dollar front (because of McCain-Feingold), was watching a little-known
candidate being flooded with exactly the kind of donations needed to build
the party."

"And instead of embracing this new energized voter-donor community, the
Democratic Party establishment eared up to squash it."

"The DLC publicly launched its anti-Dean campaign on May 15, 2003, by
releasing a memo titled 'The Real Soul of the Democratic Party." It was a
broadside against party activists, saying 'the great myth of the current
cycle is the misguided notion that the hopes and reams of activists
represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Real Democrats are
real people, not activist elites'"

"The netroots activist, much like the new generation of grassroots
activist, is fiercely partisan, fiercely multi-issue, and focused on
building a broader movement. It's not an ideological movement -- there is
actually very little, issue-wise, that unites most modern party activists
except, perhaps occupation to the Iraq War."

"Reform-minded activists feuded for years with the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee (DCCC) regarding its selective targeting of U.S. House
races. Ever since losing the majority in 1994, the DCCC has targeted about
thirty or so races every two years , just enough by its calculations to
provide a simple majority -- and has abandoned Democrats in all the other
races…. [E]ven in the short term, that strategy hurts Democrats."

"The 2005 special election in Ohio's Second District was a great example of
why Democrats should take on all districts, no matte how heavily Republican
they swing. Bush won the District with 64 percent of the vote in 2005 and
no Democrat had won the district since 1974 … But online Democratic
activists, ready to get over the 2004 losses .. were especially excited
about the Democratic candidate who stepped into the race. It was Paul
Hackett, a relative neophyte, politically speaking… A group of bloggers in
Ohio … took up Hackett's cause. Soon the regulars at Daily Kos and MyDD
were onto the race followed by the folks over at Democracy for America …
These online activists raised money, parried Republican smear attacks on
Hackett, generated volunteers, performed opposition research, and created a
nationwide (online) blogswarm in a race otherwise invisible in the
traditional media and D.C. political establishment. … When election day
(August 2, 2005) was over, Hackett had come shockingly close -- he lost by a
mere 3.5 percent."

"No matter how you look at it, challenging Republicans in all races and all
geographic areas is a good idea -- it builds the Democratic Party's brand,
it exhausts the Republicans' resources and it sows the seeds for future
Democratic wins."

"The bloggers and netroots can help organize local activists, as can groups
like MoveOn and Democracy For America…Moveon.org has a list of more than 3
million progressive activists nationwide with significant presences in
almost every states … The progressive blogosphere has millions of readers in
every corner of the nation."

"The reformation is underway. A whole new generation of progressive
activists has stepped in to engage the fight against the conservative
juggernaut. We are ready and eager for battle. Technology now allows
people from all corners of the country (and even Americans living abroad) to
organize and effect change. The netroots is already measured in millions
and growing at a terrific pace. By 2005, four to five million progressives
were congregating on blogs, while millions more in activist groups were
organizing online. It is not inconceivable that we might see these online
activist numbers grow to twenty to twenty-five million by the end of the
decade."

The last two sentences of the book:

"Throughout history, people have taken hold of such opportunities. Now, we
will too."

David Weiner has been a sociology professor, high school teacher, community
organizer, anti-racism activist and political radical for more than half a
century. Nowadays he teaches sociology and social psychology at a community
college in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at dweiner@austin.rr.com.

Submitter: Joan Brunwasser

Submitters Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Submitters Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.