I saw the trumpeting of They Work For US by Markos and Matt about Steve Rosenthal's group, but the second shoe dropping wasn't near as loud (the group launched with three incumbents being challenged on their website and quickly erased the offenders). I'm not surprised by the capitulation as it's damn near impossible to have a mega-organization insurgency group in agreement, and definitely impossible without ideological grounding. And this week, the capitulation is being used by local papers around Tauscher to show the failing of the PAC as implying the netroots (here and here) in being a viable force against Tauscher.

I would agree with Marchmoon at Calitics, who sees the failure (and maybe its not a complete failure yet, but they are not even updating their website content of having pulled the three offenders-- and to me the whole thing looks DOA) as a good thing though--to keep it at the populist level. And that's probably the most realistic response-- there's nothing people-powered about Steve Rosenthal going out and raising millions to be in a figurehead position of the netroots.

The underlying reason why TWFUS had to yank their three offenders is because it was an attempt to make insurgency an establishment-level voice without having an ideological foothold. The Club for Growth is an ideological litmus vehicle (no taxes - starve the beast) that cares more about making a no-corporate-taxes statement than they do about winning or governing. The progressive movement (none of us can even agree on what the term 'progressive' means which points towards pragmatism is its basis) has no such ideological pinning to nationalize. I don't view that as a loss though, because it makes us rely upon the local area activists to create insurgency.

The building and supporting of progressive blog communities and individuals is much needed. It's not as sexy as primary challenges, and it won't generate headlines, but its got a bigger payoff under the current model of our progressive movement. We can make noise nationally but its locally that movement is made.

It's great to see that Matt and Chris are fully embracing the local blogosphere with BlogPAC. The local blogosphere should be encouraged to the point that it supplants the national blogs in importance. When I originally started BlogPAC with Markos, I envisioned that we could get 1,000 'seeders' of the PAC for monthly recurring contributions of $10 or more. 84 is a good beginning, but it needs much deeper support from the MyDD community.

Yet, if BlogPAC tried to become a sort of national PAC that goes in and tries to impose primary litmus tests on behalf of the netroots, it would fail just as miserably as TWFUS in holding a consensus. I'll say it again-- our progressive movement doesn't hold the sort of ideological rigidity needed to succeed that way. We could point to individual failings of representatives, over legislative matters such at the bankruptcy bill, the bill authorizing Bush to invade Iraq, the pro-torture bill, that we might all get aboard. But how likely are those types of bills under a Democratic controlled Congress? Now, just maybe there will be bills introduced that are odious enough that such PAC's becomes a viable vehicle to protest it, but if its that odious, we wouldn't need a national PAC (TWFUS activating from its webcobs) to kick-start a local rebellion (which is the only way it'd succeed) against the candidate, and we've already seen that funding by the netroots and organizations happens in such cases. We don't need establishment-like leadership to make that continue. Now, if big funders (or those big organizations that comprised TWFUS) are looking for ways to make the Democratic congress more liberal, their starting to help build and fund the local blogosphere is waiting to happen.

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bumped - Matt

I am a Democrat.  I'm proud to be a Democrat.  I couldn't be happier that the Democrats control the House and Senate.   But, I want a strong, progressive Democratic majority ruling the Congress, not a timid one that caves to corporate interests and avoids making real change.   That's one reason I am serving on the board of They Work For Us.  

They Work for Us is a new organization comprised of progressive activists who are tired of being sold out by Democrats.   Its board and supporters include some of the key players in the progressive movement, including leaders associated with the netroots, MoveOn.org, the American Association for Justice, several unions (Steelworkers, Painters, Teamsters and SEIU) and others with deep roots in the progressive community.    

We all agree that if progressives don't hold Democrats accountable for passing a progressive agenda, we're not helping.  In fact, we're hurting our cause.  Now, instead of just complaining when Democrats abandon basic principles, we can take action to keep them true to our shared goals.

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Steve's not, but he gets played for one in the NYT's:

"On the House side, it makes sense to be focusing on 25 seats to win 14, not 50.... If we had unlimited resources it would be different, but we have to be careful."

Steve Rosenthal, a consultant with close ties to the Democratic party, who described many Democrats as "overenthused."

[...well, advocating we adopt this strategy to keep minority is quite the antidote]

And that quote, which is the epitomy of the DC Democratic establishment, is something to think about before bloggers tell people and candidates to poney up to any of the Democratic committees.

Unfortunately, we don't have an infrastructure to replace these failed institutions at this time, but there is ACT Blue, where politicians can be pressured to go straight to the candidates being ignored by the establishment. Hopefully Howard Dean will be successful in blowing up the DNC and putting it back into the states. As for the DCCC and DSCC, I recall one of my favorite quotes in CTG regarding the "entrenched leadership structure" driving our campaigns, from Andy Rappaport:

Even though people are becoming a little bit more frustrated or a lot more frustrated, we haven't yet constructed anything else in which they believe-- that's our most important and medium-term challenge. It is to make this not just an intellectual discussion but really to have a parallel leadership structure.I'm not sure that having something parallel is the best solution, but the systematic ongoing failure of, on the one hand, having enough funds to do the job and, yet, still failing to grasp the change of strategy and tactics needed to win, has got to be confronted, and that campaign leadership either overthrown or ignored.

In the meantime, instead of the netroots bloggers being Rahm's hammer (and falling for the media consultants ploy) to tell candidate X to fork over $100K to the DCCC tomorrow, have 20 candidate X's asked by the netroots to max out to a list of 50 House candidates ignored by the DCCC? I realize I'm just grasping at straws, but watching this play out is a bad re-run.

Update [2006-10-22 18:51:34 by Jerome Armstrong]:A couple of people have pointed out to me that I am conflating the complaint regarding the lack of expanding on the DCCC's IE front, with the DCCC's overall effort which includes an important field component. And that that giving directly to the candidates isn't all it's made up to be either, with the greater likelyhood of it going to TV. Fair complaints, and the funding of the DCCC's field component is really crucial. That said, it doesn't excuse the lack of expansion on the IE front. I guess all in all, it's what we got this cycle -- the DCCC-- and what we have to work with is accept that they are doing some good work, and deal with the lack of expansion of any early funding to all candidates, and the lack of IE expansion in closing, in the next cycle.

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