One of our goals when we set out to write a history of the rise of netroots politics from 2002 to 2006 was to document a variety of different perspectives on the phenomenon. Not just the usual cheerleaders of online politics, but also candidates, campaign consultants, and even Republicans.

We're using the book's website as a kind of online appendix to the book where we post complete interviews, sections that didn't make it into the book and other items of interest to readers of the book.

Here are some of the interviews we've posted thus far:

• Senator Jim Webb: "My campaign was a bottom-up endeavor"


• Webb consultant Steve Jarding: "This transitional era is a tsunami"


• Jon Henke: "George Allen's netroots coordinator"


• Donnie Fowler, Jr. on the Clark Campaign, the "Draft Clark" movement, and the Netroots as a "wild, raging river"

We'd like to welcome MyDD to read the joint blogger coverage from the 2008 Democratic Convention at RootsWire.org - http://www.rootswire.org.  

We are an informal group of bloggers from the Democratic Convention (credentialed and otherwise) who are pulling together our blog entries, video, live blogging, photos, and more in one place to provide a full view of the Democratic Convention from a grassroots level.

If you are blogging from the convention and have any interest in participating, come on over, look around, and contact us or sign up online.  If you're just interested in the future of our country, please come over and look around as well.

cross posted from DailyKos

Well Granny calls us purity trolls, PsiFighter says we should just grow up, Olberman is telling Obama how to do his job, to read this blog lately you'd think the entire progressive movement is about to crumble to dust because our latest patron saint of progress has declared a measure of independence from us, the "righteous" left, or perhaps the "self righteous" left is apropos.

From the perspective of a generational researcher it all comes off like some kind of self indulgent comedy, like so many brilliantly argued theses on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We become trapped by our own ideology, shouting into the echo chamber that is our own little corner of the blogosphere.

We wring our hands in fret, some because our once saintly anointed leader has spurned us, and others because now that we have entered meltdown mode he is surely to crumble amidst the loss of our once united support.

In August of 2006, a man named Tim Walberg (R-Tipton) defeated incumbent Congressman Joe Schwarz (R-Battle Creek) in the Republican primary. Those that live in Michigan's 7th District may remember the vicious primary campaign, in which Walberg-- funded by the Club for Growth and other radical right-wing groups-- destroyed the name and good work of a dedicated public servant. Schwarz was conservative, but he was honest and hard-working, and was one of the few "good" Republicans left. And Tim Walberg, a former far-right minister, attacked Schwarz without mercy.

A few days after the primary, I started a blog called Walberg Watch. Originally hosted on Blogspot, I wanted to create an online record of Walberg's extreme positions as the 2006 election approached, facing the terribly underfunded Democratic nominee Sharon Renier. Walberg won that election by just four percent, and I found myself with a new blogging mission: following Tim Walberg's adventure through what will hopefully be his only term in the United States House of Representatives.

Over the last two years, a lot has changed, with much of it building toward the re-launch at the new www.WalbergWatch.com. Below the fold, I'd like to walk you through some of the additions to Walberg Watch. I'm excited by what we can accomplish in the next 126 days as we work to bring about better representation. I hope that by the time you're done reading this, you are too.

Two years ago I met Lowell Feld.

I was working with Jerome Armstrong at Mark Warner's Forward Together PAC, testing the national waters for a very successful Virginia Governor. Part of my job was reaching out to bloggers in key states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Naturally we needed to have the strong support of bloggers from Warner's home state of Virginia.

It didn't take long to figure out that getting Lowell Feld of RaisingKaine on board the Warner train was crucial.

Lowell had other things on his mind though. He was busy helping Jim Webb win a contentious U.S. Senate primary and didn't really want to discuss the 2008 Presidential campaign. As much as he liked Mark Warner, he had other things on his plate.

Over the remainder of 2006, as Mark Warner focused on helping elect Democrats, I stayed in close touch with Lowell. He had joined Webb as a full-time staffer, leaving behind a secure government job for the stormy seas of the campaign trail. When the poll numbers weren't what he wanted to see, he vented to me and I tried to use my decade's experience on the campaign trail to give him perspective.

When "Macaca" hit, we IM'd back and forth trying to figure out how to turn George Allen's blunder into a perfect storm for the Webb campaign.

After the nail-biter of an election we celebrated the victory and began talking about what was next for the two of us. In particular, we discussed possible ways in which we might be able to keep contributing to the netroots movement which had helped revitalize the Democratic Party -- and, more broadly, our democracy -- over the past few years.

We looked back with awe at the amazing campaign cycle we'd just been through, one which saw Democrats win majorities in both houses of Congress against long odds, and one which saw not at least half a dozen scrappy, underfunded candidates -- including Jim Webb -- beat BOTH the Democratic establishment in the primaries and the GOP in the general.

We knew something amazing had happened. And, because we had been behind the scenes working the internet for Democrats, we had a nuts-and-bolts perspective on what really made the big wins of 2006 possible. We were both pretty sure it wasn't Rahm Emmanuel's "move to the center." We were also both sure that wouldn't have happened without the explosion of citizen activism called the "netroots".

Somehow, the idea of writing a book to tell the story of the grassroots movement that made the difference for Democrats in 2006 came up. We'd both been involved since the beginning (2003) -- me as a Howard Dean activist in Texas, Lowell as a part of Wes Clark's netroots campaign and as founder of the Virginia political blog Raising Kaine (in January 2005).

Lowell hooked us up with a book deal and the next six months were a flurry of research, interviews, digging up old notes and emails and writing. We couldn't tell all the important stories -- honestly we couldn't even tell a small fraction of the important stories -- but we tried to tell the stories we knew the best and one or two others where we had access to great sources.

The book we wrote, Netroots Rising, is officially released tomorrow. As a supplement to the book, we'll be posting some of the many excellent interviews we did during our research for the book. We also plan to conduct new interviews and to write about some of the great stories that we didn't have room for in the book that will be posted on the Netroots Rising site.

SusanG at DailyKos was kind enough to give us a very good review on Daily Kos today. She neatly summarized a key part of the book, something that we worked very hard to pull off:

This project is just beginning. We've made huge leaps since 2002 -- when there was effectively no way for non-wealthy individuals with no inside connections to impact the political system -- to now, when many of us have found ways to come together online and off to make many small impacts that cumulatively can be very large. There is an enormous amount of work remaining, but we wanted to tell some of the stories of 2002-2006 while the memories were fresh.  

Bleeding Heartland has been sparring with some Iowa Republican bloggers about the appropriate policy responses to the recent catastrophic flooding (see this post and this follow-up).

Here are some things I have learned.

Convening a special legislative session to address Iowa's flood relief, clean-up and reconstruction needs would be an example of Democrats "politicizing the floods." State officials should wait to see what the federal government does before taking those steps.

But this does not imply that Iowans should "sit on their heinies and wait for the feds to come in and fix everything." We are better than that:

Iowans can fix most things ourselves. It's just a matter of who is going to pay for it all after the fact. This isn't like New Orleans, where (I heard some relief worker on the radio the other day say that) out-of-state volunteers had to wake up residents at 10 a.m. so that the volunteers could get inside the houses where the residents then sat around and watched the volunteers work.

When the legislature does convene, it would be wrong for the state of Iowa to borrow money to invest in reconstruction.

Instead, we should cut fat out of the budget, such as excessive spending on education.

Also, we should cut corporate income taxes to discourage flood-damaged businesses from moving to new communities or out of state.

Any questions?

P.S.--The real lessons I learned were:

1. Conservatives love to trot out their fake fiscal responsibility. In this case, Iowa bloggers make a big deal out of needing to live within our means and not pass on debt to our children and grandchildren. But their response to the floods amounts to, "Let the (deeply-indebted, huge-deficit-running) federal government pay for as much as possible."

2. Republicans will offer corporate tax cuts as a solution to any problem.

3. When the going gets tough, count on right-wing talk radio to make people feel better by reinforcing their racist stereotypes.

Well, they've done it again.  

Obama bloggers--paid or unpaid--have turned yet another democratic blog, the great MyDD, into an "obamablog", where any statement critical of Obama is met with faux outrage, dismissal, and ridicule.  The Obama people have smeared all democrats who do not fall in line with them.  HRC supporters have been banned, warned, had their work edited, and "gang-troll rated" into oblivion.  

MyDD has gone the way of daily kos.  

The purpose of this diary is to respond to an earlier reccommended diary on the "signs of republican or McCain trolls"--or ways to spot what the author called "democrats supporting McCain."  The diary disturbed me as it seemed the penultimate way to trash every HRC supporter who said anything critical of Obama...in other words, "criticize Obama = republican troll". The diary received many comments, and led subsequently to various commenters awarding "McCain points" to several HRC diarists in other posts, or to employ the "dismiss the argument" tactic by saying "is this snark?"

I don't want the site's obama people to forget that their behavior is transparent and how it is easy to see how they have approached and managed to take over so many blogs, and done so by maligning another democrat and half the democratic party that supports her. If you dare, follow below the fold.

or, Sowing the Seeds of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

Dozens of progressive bloggers descended upon Washington DC for a Blogger's Summit this weekend. From the reddest of red states to the bluest of blue, from huge state blogs to smaller state blogs, from bloggers on black issues to bloggers on Latino issues, it was truly a diverse group of bloggers.  Oh, and at times,  it seemed as if half the people at the bloggers hailed from California, Colorado and Michigan.

The effort by the New Organizing Institute, the Center for American Progress, Media Matters and the Arca Foundation was phenomenal, and my hat is off to them.