As we become more coordinated and activist, I am reminded of how I saw Robertson, Regan and their ilk beginning to see grand visions of a takeover two decades ago.  Similar grand views of seizing power are abound, though we will do it much differntly.

By the same token, just as dems were fat and lazy and complacent, beginning at the end of the carter admin. up until about two years ago, I can also see a parallel in the GOP, though this phase seems to be only in the infantile stages.  They are truly drunk with power, like Harry Reid said.
They are begginning to turn their back on small government, state's rights, and other issues that brought them to power.
Much like the dems began to do in the late 80's, culminating with Clinton's need to appease the GOP in the name of consensus, when he didn't see they were out to bury his own party no matter what he did.

Ah, the cycle of life.

Perhaps, but the Virginia Democratic Bloggers have pulled together to promote Democratic Candidates running in 2005.

-Having been a practitioner of strategy formulation in the corporate sphere, and thus run brainstorming groups, I think there is a big advantage in the blogs with the best feedback loops because you get a richer pool of ideas, despite the bloodflow,net of the often kneejerk resistance.  And it is so fast.  I think that is huge, but I wonder  if anyone is actually going through, analysing it and making use of it.  

-How can I put this. Let me define a spectrum of comments ranging from the most reserved & cerebral to the most impulsive and volcanic.  Progressive blogs seem to me to be more in the middle range bringing both energy and creative insight whilst conservative blogs tend to be bunched up at either end of the spectrum, popping off nonsense on the one hand or merely mouthing the weekly slander on the other.

In progressive blogs, honesty is a value as is reasoning from empiracal evidence..  Absent for the most part from coinservative blogs.  This is far more than being faith based or reality based.  It's about hubris and believing in your own ad campaign.

-My impression, which is perhaps mistaken, is that progressive blogs tend to be a generation younger than the conservative rocking chair bloggers.  

-Related to this is that while Grandpa spends more time getting information, his sources are not in the business of providing valid information (ie Rush)  Garbage in, garbage out.   Those on the progressive side seem more often to be coming from direct experience and academic specialties.  The result approximates the difference between, let's say a National Geographic special on the one hand  and a cartoon on the other.  

Good Luck, Chris.

Highlighting the local blogs will drive traffic to them, and bring them to a wider audience.

I think that the back-and-forth of the blogs gets yo into the mode of defending leaders and figures that you identify/agree with.  This is a great way to have people become invested in the Democratic and progressive point of view.

First you read.  Then you write.  Then you give.  Then you volunteer.  Then you run.  Then you lead.

At least, that's a best case scenario.  Not gonna be that path for everyone, but... I think this is gonna be a valid path for enough people to make an impact.  Not everyone will choose to go all the way to running, or leading, but  getting people at any stage of the process is great for the party/movement.

Describing the conservatives you've used the following points: local, televised, partisan talking point, and free. This is also accurate.

But again, Chris, what you leave out tells a story about where you want to go. I will try to complete these points then provide a way these points can integrate to your larger goal which I assume is just directed towards Soros. He just dissolved ACT and his money is going to go somewhere.

But let me caution you by saying I've been a member of moveon.org forever, and we're not a bunch of partisans rather we're all mostly independent and very proud of our unified goal to keep people from constantly feeding us bullshit and calling it ice cream. Democracy works with independently verified, free press. When people are informed and the government does the least it can do to get everyone working together - its not going to be a simple solution just like declaring independence, when you thought of yourself as a british citizen - was, for our ancestors.  So I am writing from the perspective of someone who's always identified more with moveon.org (I challenge anyone here to find one place where there positions were wrong - even the GOP is now starting to cotton to the Karl Rove situation )
than with the democratic party so my partisan index is really zero (hey, I got involved just to make sure we get bill clinton censured. I wasn't trying to keep him from getting impeached - I was a supporter of Newt Gingrich - I felt he committed a crime, and I wanted censure. I still get upset at all the money America spent on whitewater)

Well to begin with - let's start with Tim Cairl's first talking point he circulated in the backrooms in early 2004, which was - his expressed concern about the unity of the netroots. Cairl's background was a child from a fundamentalist baptist southern family. Later, as a homosexual, Cairly had to endure the near-hate crime level of intolerance he found in a southern small town. He dedicated his organization to pushing forward GLBT  equality , if on the face of it they are towards the democratic party - their agenda will always remain tightly integrated to what he feels is a civil rights issue.   Cairl's focus in late 2002 and early 2003 in the discussions on how to begin a netroots (which by the way, also involved finding the talent for Dean who built blogforamerica and other things that Dean still shakes Tim's hand about..) began with Cairl's warning that we "may not be able to unify these forces".  This is still in the mind of large donors the largest strike against you and must be addressed first.

Now, I am a libertarian so I'm not going to take sides. My side is to throw out about half of government that doesn't work, turn everything over to the people and tax the corporations mightily (ok, libertarian democrat you could say) to fund what half is left over, maybe to do the job the other is keeping it from doing. Not partisan split, mind you, just cleaning house (ex. Did you know America maintains over 12 Federal reserve bank locations at a cost of 20 M a piece? For the purpose of bringing money in by trainload to banks - this is an age of electronics, and we don't use trains anymore to ship currency around. Every person involved in reform should be asking themselves why we pay a quarter billion dollars a year to adopt an f-scott-fitzgerald approach to wire transfers..).

Alright.  So we identify the bugbear - Cairl was right - its unity. Cyberspace, as gingrich wrote so long ago, is fundamentally libertarian.  Not the most unified bunch of folks (although I'm sure the democrats think its cute to keep IRV and other such items off the table and infiltrate the decidedly open ranks whenever its their convenience ... i say we should unite them but i digress ..)

Unity.

Then the second point Soros is going to look for. Its not activism, mind you. Its connectivity. You want to be connected to the resources that can get the aims of the donor completed. In Soros' case this means stabilizing america in the international currency theatre. Soros wants America to be a beacon of democracy and not the flashlight of PNAC that it is today. When that happens soros DOES plan to CASH IN on his investment so lets disabuse ourselves of that notion that your donor is all happy with a few people standing out in the rain by the roadside. He will want results for his cash, and there will be management consequences if he doesn't get it.
Connectivity maybe is not the best word here but it'll have to do.

Unity. Connected Activism.

Lets see... finally I would say that if you're approaching partisans - which it seems that you are - you will need to look at their metric as well. Generally my donors are die hard minnesota independents so I get away without this, but you'll have to look at their bona fide number one metric of success - and folks, this includes the silicon vally too which right now has to be antsy about Dean - and that is.. drum roll please... winning elections.  Thats right folks, they want state, local, and federal elections to be their index count. There's a party identification and a total number of seats won. Thats what they need. Never mind that the same forces converge on each and every one of those seats and that the lobbyist forces destroy their platform in the process, they want the putative win. So this has to be it.

Unity. Connected Activism. Victory.

Now that completes the first step, get inside the mind of your donor. So George is sitting there now across the table. You've delivered shit to him in 2004. He's already brought the knife to ACT and he's preparing to either double down on this game or burn you and go try something else. The party depends on you  (wave a flag). Labour unions are cutting bait.  Go to the table with your bullet points. Lets see.. get the file on my desk here.. Bowers...bowers... where is it.. Ah yes.

meritocratic, partisan, activist, communal and vested.

the eyes glaze over. the checkbook goes back into his pocket.  now, just to be a devil. lets switch
hats - you're the conservative guy. you've just won, bigtime. you've got a lock on the supreme court which is where the real pain is right now - and you're playing for keeps.  you come in and present:

local, televised, partisan talking point, and free communal.

Ok you see his eyebrows raise when he notices you've got something that connects to real people in that local thing. He knows all politics are local.  Then he closes the checkbook and politely shakes your hand and asks you to climb back into your gremlin, gun the engine and drive yourself back to scranton and he'll call you later. Which he doesn't.

Now, the winning approach borrows from both.

First, lets reiterate what they are looking for here (in sort order):

Connected Activism. Unity.  Electoral Victory.

So lets take your points and put them into sort order. We'll start there.

You wrote: vested, communal  partisan, activist, meritocratic.

They're big dogs. They'll laugh off the nickle and dime amounts of money involved. Blow away the vested part. Also they know the email lists aren't worth a nickle. They're underperforming even now.
Why would you be going to them for funding? Forget about this one. Either you've got the money, or you dont. Lets deal with the case, that you dont.

Meritocracy can form the basis of unity, so it barely hangs on.  For example, over here at myDD we don't have some out of work ski lift operator in Vermont knocking me off this blog because some homosexual guy in San Francisco thinks tbs is bad for the gay activist cause. I like that.  And the son of a bitch was wrong too. (jab at those bozos that lost the election for dean). Rate this post and keep turnerBroadcasting alive! (hey if you want to be pro-civil rights and anti-gay marriage, go right ahead - just look at what my uncle did with the episcopal church - I know its possible)

We're left with :

communal, partisan, activist, and meritocratic.

and then put them in sort order.

activist, communal, partisan, meritocratic

Then on the so called conservative side you've got (again, your sort order) :

local, talking points integrated, interblog communities, free media (television)

They're big money, so they're definitely looking at television - but what they've got on their desk about it is not good - ave. 2 hours less in the age range they focus on here - viewership dropping by 20% and huge investments in 04 that did not perform.  Talking points integrated, they know is a problem. Lets say they'll strike free media.

We're left with (applying sort order to their priority):

activist, communal, partisan, meritocratic
local, talking points integrated, interblog communities

(editor's note: the republican side was already in sort order when chris wrote it. this probably means that he doesn't want to give away his strategy after all..)

Now lets do a merge.

activist, local, communal, talking points integrated, interblog communal, meritocratic, partisan

Alright. Is it a frankenstein's monster?
Yes there are some parts that don't work.
But notice how the activism is connected to community.  If you're 10% of the population,
that means you're 10% of the group. It doesn't
mean you get beaten up (communal) but that you
will be part of a more effective campaign (talking points).

Interblog communal - no problem. That is a social metric that just involves people going to the blogs more, and the news media entertainment less.
They like tight. They don't give a damn about blogads. Its a google business model they want. They don't care as long as a half a paragraph can get out to the right people at the right time.
More the merrier.

Meritocracy helps alot because thats basically what Soros used to get out of eastern europe - he worked very, very hard and he got rewarded for it. But the mechanism that locks this in as an advantage is basically that you can cash reward the people who are working - there are people out there working very, very hard. I remember in the Dean campaign I was all about getting a friend of mine a chance to be paid for the nearly night and day work she did. It ended up that the bozos that lost the campaign for dean thought it a better Idea to pay UPS shipping for their materials instead of print locally and they burned through 20 million bucks in three months. Not that impressive if you're talking to big money. But my work was dedicated to getting this person and her friends paid. They ultimately did get a little bit of money. The key is, if they did good for the funding organization's aims they should be able to trust YOU as the manager of those funds to be able to disburse them properly. I would just offer that the key to this is to be objective and try not to be a partisan when it comes to payout - help comes from all kinds of odd places. Ask Sen. Frist about this sometime - he's acting on his own strength of faith right now. I think he deserves kudos for it now that the senate is within 3 votes of supporting stem cell research. Do you like Sen. Frist? Well you'd better if your donor org. thinks Stem Cell research helps re-establish american pre-eminence in promoting real democracy and innovation.

Partisan. Look, just make the party a comfortable place to hang out. Thats all. I don't think they care about used up old jet trash TV advertising polls that don't work anymore. They're more interested in how tightly everyone moves together.

thats why they funded moveon.org.
They've received fantastic returns on their moveon money - and moveon isn't spending it like it was water, either - thats why moveon.org works.
believe me, if you're helping moveon, you're going to be alright.  I hope they support John McCain, to tell you the truth. I hope they never turn into a parrot organization of the democratic party.
I hate parrots. They speak, but they don't understand the words they use. Its like currency traded without understanding its value.

turnerBroadcasting.

My experience with being 'activated' by a blog is the Democratic Party didn't know what to do with in 2004 and doesn't know what to do with me now.

In 2004 I offered to help raise money for the Kerry Campaign.  After 4 telephone calls to the HQ and several emails I finally got an email from a fund raiser, she told me what she wanted, I arranged it, told her I arranged it, and {sounds of silence.}  Over a year later I still haven't heard back.

Last year I went to several local meetings of the DP.  Badly organized, badly run, and ill-attended in a location almost perfectly hidden.  Several precinct leaders were not present and nobody knew if those precinct leaders were alive, much less organizing their precincts in preparation for the election.

2 months ago I offered, as an un-paid volunteer, to start writing position papers, advertisments, web pages, and etc for a forthcoming campaign.  I made the same offer, help raise money, I made to the Kerry campaign.  No answer.

I do not expect my offers to be received with cries of joy but I do expect to be treated with competence.  If they weren't interested in the offers the minimum would be a telephone call saying, "Thanks but No Thanks."  Even an off-hand "Fuck You" is better than being treated with a stony silence.

Until the DP gets its act together and creates the HR structures for managing the energy created by the blogs your effort is pointless.  

National and state blogging is easier because there is ample material to pull from and riff off of. This isnt true of a lot of localities.

Our group, licking county pro-active citizens is a county blog and PAC, we dont carry ads or the like so wouldnt get sucked into your analysis i dont think, but we have had almost 20,000 hits in just a few months since we began - and there is much better communication between grass and net roots in Ohio now.

Making it local is key to generating that loud echo chamber. being able to filter down the messages to targetted local audiences and giving it a local themse is critical. Anything that progresses that is a net plus.

For our part we have gotten a regular guest column in our local right wing rag, and since then the opinions pages have become far more balanced.

so as much as it takes money, which it sure does, it also takes time and a lot of fricken effort.

I think the bigger blogs could help a lot by filtering down some credit to the smaller local blogs to reward that effort and also help people connect to them. Rather than atrios and kos and mydd etc just linking to each other.

I think that would help to structurally grow the progressive net roots. We have actually gained quite a lot of local readership via diaries at kos and posts here - and also formed relationships with other ohio bloggers.

so having some kind of a loose structural framework would be good.
National netroots
---State netroots
-----county state roots

would create a tighter bond and message machine and activist netowrk. I was thrilled blogpac has something like this, and that effort needs to be pushed more and harder.