There's not a whole lot of institutional memory that remembers or has documented what went on during the 2000 elections in terms of netroots activism. The Democrats had nothing in comparison to the Freepers with their Drudge and FreeRepublic. There was the now defunct politics.com for chatter, which had a hell-raiser forum; there were the Delphi Forums which, as soon as one became widely known about, would become a war zone, and folks would move onto some other forum; and there was Salon, with the netroots vestiges of Tabletalk, which had the only remnants of Democratic political activism around that I recall.

Mostly though, throughout the 2000 election, Tabletalkers just bitched alot. It was interesting talk, but taking it offline wasn't happening on our side. However, in watching the Freepers pull their shit in Florida during 2000, we Dems on the net realized we'd been burned, left in the dust to watch as the freepers created SoreLoserman gifs and organized online for offline activism. Post-that, given the lame status of the Democratic Party in DC, the only way out seemed to pray that McCain-Feingold passed (against many in the party's wishes), and that the DNC-DCCC-DSCC would then have no choice but to go cold turkey from the corporate soft money drug.

As for Democrats online, we had no choice but to do something, anything, to begin our netroots. It didn't help that Tabletalk went to subscription-based, which pushed out to dispearse, what had been happening there. But still, it started, mostly in sharing the outrage. Sites like Buzzflash.com and DemocraticUnderground.com started in 2001, blogs started happening. Florida energized, but Bush kept feeding the rage. The appointment of Ted Olson, who argued Bush's Florida case before the Supreme Court to the hithertoo nonpartisan position of Solicitor General in May 2001, is what sparked MyDD content. Then, during 2002, as anyone LT reader here would recall, MyDD served as the nexus for Howard Dean's fledging campaign, and thousands of online readers latched on to Dean's proud Democratic message, but the online community for Democrats, even among the big sites forming in 2002, was still mostly all talk.

During the midterms of 2002, there wasn't even a noticible spike in online contributions to different candidates leading up to the midterms, but community was happening. CFR had passed, which filled half the equation, and I think the passing of the Iraq invasion by so many Democrats in the Senate, the unexpected death of Wellstone, and the defeat of 2002 all combined to create a sort of ticking bomb just waiting for an outlet. When Mark Ambinder posted Lott's racist remarks in The Note, the blogs like Atrios and TPM broke out, helping to take down Lott. Whoa, power. And by March 2003, the community was ready to gel with fundraising, tens of thousands of small donors to Dean's campaign materialized with .01 added to their contributions from places all over the net. 2003 was the great equalizer year for the Democratic Party. Wow, millions of combined dollars. And by early 2004, huge community sites like Daily Kos, Dean's Blog for America, and Clark's CCN were wielding financial and activist power.

It seemed a longshot back in 2000, especially in time for 2004, that both CFR would pass and that the small donors among the Dems would materialize, rising the Democratic Party from the ashes of corporatization. And yet, it has, but as Silent E notes here, it's just a beginning. And now we have to fight the slime & smear tactics of the right, as they re-ignite their 2000 tactics for the 2004 cycle:

Back in 2000, the Freepers WERE politically active, they were holding rallies, skewing CNN's internet polls, and trading unflattering pictures and stories about Gore (pushing the "makes stuff up" meme as hard as possible). Worse yet, they were ambushing Internet neophytes by distributing cut-n-paste letters to the editor, or flooding small newspapers with angry phone calls from across the country.

But in 2000, those Freepers were already hooked in to the GOP machine - they'd been giving the small donations out of habit for years because of the GOP success with direct-mail. Lots of observers thought that the Dems could never catch up and build a sophisitcated operation, and that Dems would never amass the large small-donor army of regular check-writers. The Internet was a short-cut!

But, that Dems now have the ability to tap into a large army of small donors is not an advantage: it's parity. And then, only for donors. We still need a VLWC, partisan think tanks, rabid WSJ-op-ed-style newspapers, and progressive 24-7 cable news channels.

Parity. Even though much has happened, and Dems online efforts now swamp those of Republicans, we are still just now even. It will be with dollars that we equalize the congressional and senatorial races, but for the Presidential, it's online netroots activism, from the bottom up.

I got a call from a friend who is working on the Kerry campaign today to let me know some details of the fight against the slime & smear Republicans that Kerry is fighting. Then it occurred to me, that this is the first time that I think the Kerry campaign has gotten pissed off enough to fight back. I worked against Kerry in the primary, and I never really thought the campaign had that much of a fight (granted, it was not much called for). I know we in the Dean campaign had the fight-- hell, we nearly won the nomination, despite having to take on the Party institution, Media, & GOP DC-trifecta all at the same time. yet, Dean never really tried to take Kerry down, nobody did. We hoped he'd fall, and pushed, but we didn't get to the freeper biting-at-the-ankles feeding-frenzy point, not even close. And Kerry, after he won unexpectedly in Iowa, coasted home like no other nominee had done in a longtime. So, I think the Kerry campaign had been, up to this month and for the most part, untested.

Josh Marshall had a great line the other day, about how Kerry had been asking for Bush to bring it on, noting that, it's on. But it's not just on for Kerry, it's on for the entire netroots community that wants to beat Bush. It's work, and it's the get-down-in-the-mud dirty work of pinning to ground (despite the mud) of the freepers. Holding rallies, skewing CNN's internet polls, and trading unflattering pictures and stories about Bush? Yea. Distributing cut-n-paste letters to the editor, or flooding small newspapers with angry phone calls from across the country? Yep, gotcha.

That and more. If we want to win, we'll do whatever it takes. I believe the Netroots is already at this point, and has been for some time. The good feeling I have about Kerry, is that I think he'll do whatever (and I really mean whatever) it takes to win. But again, that just means we are at parity.