After Lieberman's latest outrage, I am in the mood for a good rant today. Matt Taibbi provides it (emphasis mine):The unspoken subtext of this increasingly bitter debate between the Democratic Party establishment and the supporters of people like Ned Lamont and Hillary Clinton's antiwar challenger, Jonathan Tasini, is a referendum ordinary people have unexpectedly decided to hold on the kingmaker's role of the holy trinity of the American political establishment - big business, the major political parties, and the commercial media. The irony is that it's the political establishment itself that has involuntarily raised the consciousness of its disenfranchised voters.

The surge in support for Lamont initially came from people motivated by two simple things -- a desire to protest the war in Iraq, and physical revulsion before the wrinkled, vengeful persona of Joe Lieberman. But the party, in fighting back, attacked not on the issues but on the means of protest -- blogs, grassroots activism, Lamont's independent wealth. In doing so it threw into relief the essential parameters of the problem, which is this; the Democratic Party has been operating for two decades without the active participation of its voters.

It raised money by appealing directly to companies in private fundraisers, and it used the commercial media to enforce its policy positions, in particular its desire to "clearly reject our antiwar wing," as Al From put it a few years back. On one point, Tabbai seems to miss a rather essential fact: Lamont is the nominee of one of the major parties that we are supposedly attacking and trying to tear down. However, he has an extremely salient point that I had not previously put together in my mind. The general response to the progressive movement from large sections of the Democratic establishment has been to attack the very means by which any challenge to their supremacy has operated. As the progressive movement rises, just look at the following attacks that have become prominent during this election cycle:

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Update: I have received an email from another credible source that insists that Jordan Lieberman was never an Associate at Alexander Strategy Group, and that it was a typo made by the American Association of Political Consultants once, in 2004. Also, Lieberman resigned from the Publius Group January 2002. The source further claims that that at that time there were no partners in the group, although some claim otherwise--Chris

Last summer, I wrongly accused PoliticsPA and all PoliticsXX sites of being funded by the Claremont Institute, a major arm of the right-wing noise machine. When it came out that I was wrong, I think I was listed as the "loser of the week" on PoliticsPA three out of four weeks in the late summer. It was a little embarrassing, but not really that embarrassing, because the entire incident did result in nearly every local progressive blogger to stop linking to, and even reading, PoliticsPA. That caused a very real downturn in their traffic at the time. I'll gladly exchange that for a personal loss of credibility within the Pennsylvania political establishment.

Even though I was wrong, the incident was revealing to me on a number of fronts. First, it brought the insider / outsider dynamic within politics to the forefront of my attention, an idea that eventually led to what I think is my useful activist class war formulation. It served as an object lesson that made it patently clear to me how severely those individuals well-ensconsed in the power structure of any political establishment, be it national, state, or local, would guard their power when faced with the rising tide of grassroots, outsider, reformer activism. In time, that has become even more clear to me, given the struggles to replace the ward leaders we have faced in my neighborhood, the legal challenges to people running for committee person we have faced in the city, the Philadelphia Democratic Party organizing "to battle the bloggers on their own turf", and a whole list of other, uglier crap that I'm not going to go into here (here is the tip of the iceberg, read Young Philly Politics regularly for more).

Second, the incident also revealed to me the total market failure for local news in America, especially local political news. During the incident, I talked with a number of people who worked in local and state politics, and they indicated that while they thought something odd may or may not be taking place with the funders of the Publius Group, it didn't really matter to them. PoliticsPA was the only news outlet that provided the sort of up to date, detailed information on Pennsylvania politics, and so they were going to keep reading it until another outlet came along to do the same thing. In short, even if the right-wing noise machine was behind these local sites, it was still providing a unique service invaluable to local political activists and operatives. It thus also became obvious to me that any properly done vast left wing conspiracy was going to need to match and surpass these efforts in order to do real damage. In a total market failure for local news, progressives could step in and create active, solid local blogospheres to fill the void and counter the Republican Noise Machine at a local level.

So even if I was wrong, the experience was extremely useful to me. However, new information from commenter NJprole has appeared that suggests I may not have been that wrong after all

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