The fact that the GOPer's in the Senate put Trent Lott back into a leadership position says a lot to me.  If that is the direction they are headed, then our horizons are even brighter than we know.

I think Trippi is not really all there. Dean made his statement almost by himself. Joe Trippi was paid to simply stand there and tell Dean to let them have it.

What Dean did, in I and my husband's view at least, was stand, as an American, in his kitchen, holding a copy of the new york times and just lift his voice up to heaven "what in the heck is going on here?"

To a person, every man woman and child in America should be uplifted one day by his simple story. He rose to the top of the Democratic party and even, before he was paul - simoned by Gephardt - to the top of the ticket.

Then, people like Trippi killed him off. They thought he simply wasn't "presidential". Who were they to judge? This man had risen up to the  top of every single american's mind, love or hate, because he had one goal: to speak truth to power. And how!

So, now, thanks to Dean and Deaniacs (let's count: Chris Bowers, Myself, Everyone here..) we now have a "Give 'em hell Harry" Senate Majority Leader and the first woman speaker of the house in history.

Her agenda is my agenda: get to work, and get the job done.

If the Democratic party succeeds in that, it is no longer simply a cynical numbers game. This is the only game where trippi is a factor (did anyone see Trippi's ads that he ran on Dean - or his "sea of orange stocking caps" anti-campaigning for Dean in Iowa?).

Please pardon  me for being so blunt, but someone like Jerome Armstrong to my mind has more throw weight than Trippi. After all, Trippi has never managed a successful campaign.

And of course, Trippi's point is also well taken. The Republicans are publicly stating, through their endlessly recycled talking point memos sent out to everyone who will mindlessly parrot them back to the "Base" that they are seeking a "new leader of conservatism".

But the truth is that most conservatives as well as most liberals will continue to punch for the donkey when it will come polling time.

For Trippi to predict a shift to the right, is actually a curse in blessings disguise - he is simply writing off Nancy Pelosi.

Please try this simple thought experiment, all you wonderful testosterone soaked males out there who see this as some kind of baseball statistics numbers game --

What if Nancy kicks ass?

Will people want to move away from someone who actually gets things done?

I think not. Just as I would not support Hillary Clinton (who seems to be more about style than substance) I will not discount the butterfly effect that the Democrats making a strong run out of the gate -  a butterfly effect that will change the very fabric of the american polity fo ryears to come.

Because it will acknowledge what trippi felt he had to write a book about to claim, but what 2006, without his meddling - shows to be true - that the internet is now the dominate force in American politics. Al Gore didn't invent it but the fact that he and Moveon.org did a great job at GOTV means that the move is on , not to the left or right - but to the truth.

With a Capitol T

At the risk of sounding like a wet blanket, the pics from Roots camp were awfully white and awfully male. This really is a problem for Netroots and we need more black, female, and rural bloggers. So if anyone answering to any or all of those descriptions is reading this, please start blogging!

From what I've seen in SC, my most hardcore neocon/theocon acquaintances are already lining up with either McCain or Romney.  (I've been quite surprised with how many have rationalized the Mormon factor...given that it's the Deep South and all.)

Perhaps this year will break the trend, but the SC Republican primary has chosen the Republican nominee every year since 1980, when Lee Atwater buckled down the "first in the South" primary for SC.

The two biggest GOP consultants in SC have signed onto '08 campaigns, and they are the same ones who waged the Bush v. McCain bloodbath here in 2000.  Bush's SC consultant, Warren Tompkins, is backing Romney this go 'round, and McCain stuck with his '00 consultant, Richard Quinn.

I do think the right is looking for a Huckabee-esque type to gain some momentum in the field, but given the allegiances of operatives here to the respective SC GOP camps, I don't see anyone else getting much oxygen in SC.

Right wing ideologues have done increasingly well in the Iowa caucusses.  In 1988, Pat Robertson finished second with 24.6% to Bob Dole's 37.4%. In 1996,Pat Buchanan finished a surprisingly close second to Bob Dole with 23% of the vote (22,512 votes),  steve Forbes got 10%. A little noticed fact from the Iowa caucusses in 2000 is that right wingers who had never held off ice got a majority of the votes (Forbes 30%, Keyes 14%, Bauer 9%). Bush was the only politician actively competing.  He got 41%, with McCain who was sitting it out, getting 5% and Hatch getting 1%.

What this shows is that the right has gotten a large and increasing share of the vote.   If the Iowa straw poll had not scasred off Lamar Alexander, Liddy Dole, Dan Quayle and the other pros, Forbes would have beaten Bush.

In 2008, with 60% plus of the Iowa vote being hard right, their time may have come.

I came out of it with a real strong inclination to push forward on moving the ball forward both through integration of the technology platforms through data sharing solutions and better coordination of the state and national political blogospheres. And that's largely what I'll be working on in 2007, so more on that later.

I'm really curious (and jealous that I seem to be missing the IT innovation gene...) about what's going on in your noodle with this.

I am curious which potential Democratic candidates had represenatives at the meeting.

The more I hear about Huckabee the more I am thinking he could pull a surprise in Iowa. None of the big 3 are a good fit for Iowa so Huckabee may have a shot at pulling together the various conservative voters like others have in the past - Pat Robertson in 1988, Pat Buchanan in 1996, and Steve Forbes in 2000.

I don't understand... what is the right's agenda?

The Dean-moment was about standing up for actual values of the Democratic party basically a center-left to middle-left position.

The right blogosphere is who...? Authoritarian Christianists?

Then today I went to a what worked in the states and a VAN meeting.

Was there a technology forum? It seems to me that the biggest millstone around our necks is that for the most part we haven't progressed beyond MoveableType and Wordpress for the vast majority of sites. DK (and to a lesser extent, myDD) push the envelope with respect to community building, and are embracing Web 2.0 stuff like tagging, but the barrier to entry for a small blogger to use the platform tools such as Scoop (plus the custom mods) is too high. And tagging hasnt been leveraged in any meaningful sense - its good practice, but we arent exploiting it in any sense.   I think that the only real example of any innovation has been ActBlue, and that is of course money orinted, which is essential bit also serves just to emphasize the "netroots = ATM" meme among the establishment.

There are a number of new technologies that in my view are poorly utilized and which would if leveraged well essentially act as force-multipliers. Instead of using new web tools to build links between blogs and knit together the progressive blogsphere into a larger whole, its evolved into isolated silos. Theresa huge DK silo over there, a myDD silo over here, Atrios over there, etc. These silos link occassionally to smaller fry but theres no routine system for "mining the long tail". As such we have a fragmented message. I dont advocate top-down message coordination as is on the right, but i think that we dont facilitate the rise of "idea bubbles" from below that well either. Diaries at DK used to be good for this but its just too big. There has to be better ways.

Here's an example of a better way (though not the ONLY way!): Del.icio.us. Look at how I deployed a del.icio.us-driven "real-time link carnival" for the Islamic blogsphere. The idea is that good links form small blogs can be promoted and disseminated widely and simultaneously on all the bigger blogs. A universal sidebar of sorts.

Another example is polling technology. There's no reason we cant build a truly scientific (email-verified) system for online polling. Why play the "freep this poll" game when we can set the agenda ourselves? And again it has to be meta - not the privince of a single blog but able to be spread horizontally across silos. I'm not the poll expert around here but I am sure that Bowers, Stoller et al can think of flaws in present online metods and also of oppostunities that come with having our own system. I will note however that online polls have the potential to be MORE scientific than phone-driven ones, since the sample size is potentailly larger. And yeah there wil be correlations with income and whatnot given the online selection, but these can be removed with moderately sophisticated statistical analysis: we have a lot of scientists in our community and we science types account for confounds al the time. That such advanced math is largely absent from polling analysis seems odd to me. MAybe we could even fund a reserach fellow for a year to look into this further. It would only take about 40k.

There are numerous other technology avenues we could pursue. For example, packaging audio from multiple liberal analysts and bloggers into a weekly podcast that we could then deliver to NPR or local public radio venues. Or funding a project to create a new API that integrates any blog RSS feed with a Wiki (analogous to Jotspot, but more universal). Or actually trying to bridge the gap between wikis and tags, or unifying the concept of forums and blogs. Or bridging from RSS to mobile phones and text messaging services.

Suppose all my ideas above were reality in 18 months. It would give us a massive advantage over the rightside in 08. And thats just scracthing teh surface with a bunch of ideas I pulled out of my ass. Imagine what a panel of technology advocates coudl come up with, given the opportunity.

50 state blog strategy?

Try a SoapBlox!  We're already doing that.

Can you point to someone or some site which has more information.  We have a problem that the VAN has a lot of function but a closed proprietary interface and is difficult to integrate in other systems.