Keep in mind that on top of the polling that shows VA to be competitive, even leaning Democratic, keep in mind that with Mark Warner running for Senate, republicans will be lackluster and shrill, and Democrats will be very strong.

In VA, Mark Warner will essentially be at the top of the ticket. Given his popularity, and the nostalgia regarding his time as Governor, I find it hard to imagine a scenario in which Republicans even make Virginia a "battleground" state.

First McCain is the frontrunner, and he falls into nothing. Then Giuliani rises to the top, and as his support crumbles the Giuliani-screwed-9-11-firefighters narrative will resonate and he'll deflate. Then what's left, Thompson? HAH!

I imagine the GOPs voting base will shift from one candidate to the next, never really coalescing around one leader. When the primaries come, it'll be a matter of musical chairs as to who happens to be on top at the time.

women from the white-male-supremacist power structure of a corporatist society.

Nevermind, it's not as catchy as the original. (Nice reference, I approve.)

The feminist methodology generally admonishes us to seek not single points of origin, but genealogies, sequences of intertwining events which neither can nor should be entirely disentangled.

We should start at 2007 and work backwards as far as we find meaning. When we stop finding meaning, that point is not the "origin," but the farthest reach of our institutional history.

It does.

I call MyDD my home, but I came here for Chris and Matt. I don't like when the parents fight.

They have a thoughtful take on the farm bill. I don't know if they're right, but it seems thoughtful. And if they're talking good policy we should keep them in mind. They'd be good allies to have.

Isaac Walton League of America

It's a conservation group with a great deal of focus on Agriculture.

Apparently a lot of pro-gun, non-liberal folk get involved, even though they're tree-huggers (and they believe that cleaner engines mean cleaner air and water; how odd.)

They blog, and they're holding their annual conference in Montana.

We're doing some really cool stuff here in Virginia, and it's 2007, so there's no other election around. Let's learn from politics at every level.

it's not that I want focus on my local stuff, it's that i'd like to see less focus on how to run the DCCC (although that is enthralling), and more focus on how to elect Democrats to school board.

what we do really well here is create an alternative information stream which gives rise to an alternative conventional wisdom. One way to make it easier for us to create this conventional wisdom would be to have some sort of message board/wiki/open-thread feature such as "2008 polling" where all discussion of polling could take place, and "framing" where people can talk about linguistics.

I'm sure there are some experts out there who have some great ideas to trade with me, but I usually only run into them when we're both commenting on something the frontpagers said. And that's an argument, not an exchange.

I blogged for a candidate last year, and I'm the communications director on a local VA race. I don't think campaign blogs are a great idea if you can't get a community going. Blogs and their networks are institutions, and campaign blogs just latch on and home to get their content into the rest of the stream.

Some people check in to get updates on the campaign, but mostly you can do that with a regular campaign site. Campaigns should have their volunteers write about the campaign on the blogs they already read and comment on.

You don't have to "own" a blog to use blogs. Of course, maybe I'm being optimistic. My area of Virginia is blessed to have not one but two community blogs at our disposal. On top of the statewide blog RaisingKaine we also have Democratic Central, devoted to progressive blogging in central Virginia (which is my region).

It's not big, but one day my dad just decided to start paying the 15 bucks a month for a soapblox account. every local democratic community needs a community blog. I think MyDD should help make that happen as the 50-state network gets fleshed out.

I'm sure your next project will be a blast.

Someone once said: After Kant, we could never do philosophy the same way again.

You've done that to politics. After following your work for three years I will never do politics the same way again. Soon, neither will the rest of the progressive movement. You blazed a pretty good trail here. Go blaze another, just get paid a little more!

is how well Clinton/other does.

Obama gets 22-24.
Edwards gets 26-29.
Clinton gets... 16-28?!?

Clinton is the only unpredictable thing here.

Mike, your intro and your style seem to probe for disagreement (which I like), and you seem to welcome a bit of a debate, so I'll give you one -- if you'll forgive me for getting a bit picky.

Points 12 (Youth voters are progressive) and 16 (Youth turnout in 2006 was anti-Bush, not pro-Dem) seem contradictory. I can sort of cock my head sideways and read them flexibly and come out with a non-contradictory reading of them, but I neither want nor need to, for reasons which should become clear momentarily.

Your wording of point 16 isn't wrong per se, but it uses a framing package ("proof of disapproval for Bush renders claims of approval for Democrats mere partisan speculation") designed by Republican strategists precisely so that its repitition would contradict and innoculate against points like no. 12.

You could just as easily have said "Voters were pissed off at Bush so they decided to give Democrats a chance, now we have to keep them happy," or something of the sort. It's the same point, but can't be contorted to support all the untruths Republicans would like people to believe, it leaves no chance of being seen as contradictory with point 12.

Whenever we notice ourselves saying exactly what Republican strategists want us to be saying, we should think twice, and try to remove whatever implications their framing is designed to embed in what is otherwise a correct statement.
See rule 6 of Progressive Realpolitik.

(All that said, you're right. We need to make sure the youth vote doesn't turn fickle.)

UVa sells students information to marketing firms. I think that sucks. There's a privacy policy with my free gmail account, but not with the ("Publicly funded") college education I'm now multi-tens-of-thousands of dollars in debt for.

Once I found out it was the University signing me up for all these mailing lists, I was too caught up working for a (losing) congressional race to actually do anything about it, but I think this is a good example precisely because of its "small potatoes" nature.

Tons of people would have signed a petition, written a letter/email to their dean/the president of the U, letters to the editor of the school papers, etc. -- small amounts of work done by thousands of people. It's practice in activism.

As Al Gore says, "Political will is a renewable resource." I would go a step further and say that if you use it it is self-renewing. The activist muscles grow stronger when they are flexed and excercised, the appetite is wetted and grows stronger.

I'd never exclude things like volunteering for campaigns for the few who are comfortable doing so, or doing something about the student loan scandal for those who already feel empowered enough to invest time for it, but this is about finding something -- anything -- to make a little movement out of and making kids (many of whom have had their parents take care of everything till they left for college) feel empowered to do something slightly bigger than themselves with a tangible payoff (everyone hates junk mail). Anyway, good post, and good points. Just thought I'd add tack my dimension on. And then nail it down.

Well it seems you're really diving in here. Welcome, and thanks. I think there's a lot worthy of discussion here, so I'm going to do the same:

85. Many young progressive activists do not know where the levers of power are on campus, in their town, in their state, or nationally.  
86. We must create ways to educate young voters/political entrepreneurs on how to build power, move power, and navigate the bureaucratic levers of our democracy to create change.

Instead of making little leaders as apprentices to the D.C. types who already run the party, we should be encouraging kids to find problems they have some real agency to solve on their own or by applying leverage to their elected representatives, instead of just serving as cogs in the pre-existing machine. The real "leaders" of tomorrow should get their activist training identifying problems and the levers of power that can tackle them, finding, motivating, and mobilizing peers, and following through.

They might end up tackling "smaller" issues, but they'll get used to being big fish in small ponds -- they'll get used to feeling, and being empowered, doing their own work and knowing that the results are their own.

This sort of activism would see Democratic establishment types not as overlords, but facilitators and guides.