Open Thread and Diary Rescue

This evening's Rescue Rangers are Got a Grip, Yashua, ezdidit, jlms qkw and noddem, with claude in the editor's chair.

• NCrissieB shares their practical approach to politics in A pragmatist's view of principles, policy, and politics. (jlms qkw)
• fitz2 reflects on current news and their own views in A Week of Lessons About Politics. (jlms qkw)

and some Recurring Concerns

• Humanity must come first. That is the argument put forth by Aimee La Fountain in a diary about our current politics within a historical context, entitled: Humanity Transcends All. (Yashua)
• Press to Digitate brings us a diary about how the smallest policy changes can have a significant impact on our lives in Trivial Epiphanies @ The Revolution. (Yashua)
• If you have ever answered a robocall and wondered What to do if you get push-polled or message-tested, read this diary from desmoinesdem. (ezdidit)
• Ovid explains that fair voting isn't solved by registration and access issues, rather it goes to the heart of the privatized electronic voting methods in Paper Trails and Software Paths. (jlms qkw)

• winterbanyan warns of the totalitarian politics of The warming climate -- A major threat to liberty, and Maaarrrk exposes several political bad actors in a great ecology diary entitled, UPDATED: Southeast Deep Coral Ecosystem Under Threat by Oil Drilling. (ezdidit)

others Get Personal

• jlang57 shares a beautiful tribute to life, Alaska, and his brother in The Salmon. (jlms qkw)
• dedmonds talks of the progress made within the LGBT community, and shares a personal story in Why Gay Pride Matters. (noddem)
• collidaescope maintains that "it is the person, not the packaging, that counts," in a personal diary about race, entitled Rainbows. (ezdidit)
• Karma Yoga is illustrated in this poetry by x.(jlms qkw)

Use this as an Open Thread, promote your own picks (or your own) and remember to Play Nice.

Beating Battle-Tested Republicans

Conventional wisdom holds - and for good reason - that incumbent Representatives or Senators who have survived a few decent challenges will be better equipped to fend off further challenges in the future.

On the face of it, this conventional wisdom makes sense. It seems logical that out of the candidates targeted for defeat by an opposing party, those who were superior campaigners would be the ones more likely to survive - and that, conversely, the weaker campaigners might be weeded out after a few cycles.

It seems logical, too, that the incumbents who were better fits for their districts would tend to win reelection more often than those who were not.

And it seems likely that an incumbent who has survived a couple of tough challenges may have learned how to handle them -  the most effective advertising strategy in the district, how best to neutralize an opponent's strength on key issues, etc.

I'm the first to admit to a "survivor" bias. If an incumbent has survived a serious challenge or two -- especially in an unfavorable political environment -- I assume no challenge is too tough. But that's a dangerous assumption to make about even the hardiest Republican House incumbents this year.

On top of the obvious troubles -- such as a serious fundraising disadvantage for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the unprecedented number of voters who say they want Democrats in charge of Congress -- they also face new and unforeseen dangers.

Here's the big one: No one can figure out just how many new or non-chronic voters are going to show up on Election Day.

She goes on to identify several key factors favoring Democratic candidates across the board in this election. Beyond simply the unpopularity of President Bush and the Republican brand, we have:

In 2006, of course, Republicans also faced an adverse political climate...and in fact, several of their incumbents who had survived strong challenges in the past, or were considered nearly invulnerable, did go down. Charlie Bass in New Hampshire, Nancy Johnson in Connecticut, Anne Northup in Kentucky, and Jim Leach in Iowa all fit this profile, and all of them were defeated. So were Clay Shaw, Rob Simmons, J.D. Hayworth and Chris Chocola.  

Naturally, a number of Republican veterans of repeated challenges did survive 2006, if just barely. Many of them are on the target list for this year, such as:

Two other notable "survivors" face tough races from Orange to Blue candidates this cycle. They are Mark Kirk in Illinois, who faces off against the impressive Dan Seals, and Randy Kuhl in New York, who faces the beloved Eric Massa. As we come to our end-of quarter push, please help these fine candidates, along with Burner and Himes, as they try to take on the toughest and most seasoned of Republican candidates.

Walter cites several other candidates who have been at the top of the national Democratic target list - and the netroots' - for several cycles, as vulnerable again this year. She specifically mentions Jon Porter of Nevada and Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado. I'd submit that several more Republican survivors are at risk this cycle despite surviving difficult races in the past, like Jean Schmidt (OH-02), and Thelma Drake (VA-02).

One could add several more names to that list, in fact, had so many Republican incumbents who barely survived 2006 not retired rather than face another challenge, as Tom Reynolds (NY-26), Deborah Pryce (OH-15), Mike Ferguson (NJ-07), Rick Renzi (AZ-01) and Jim Walsh (NY-25) have done. There have been so many retirements from candidates who narrowly won reelection, in fact, that one has to ask whether they themselves felt their number had come up, despite having won consistently in the past.

Their retirements, I think, serve to underscore the idea that traditional preconceptions may not apply in this election, and proven electoral viability even in the toughest of races may not be enough to save Republicans this time out.

This doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that every Republican incumbent whose seat has been targeted by the DCCC in the past is finally going to go down this year, of course. Republicans faced adverse political circumstances in 2006, as well, and several of their "survivors" did survive (consider all the names above, plus folks like Jim Gerlach in Pennsylvania).

Nevertheless, it appears that the political environment is so toxic for Republicans that even being a superior campaigner and a well-liked Representative does not guarantee electoral success.

Late Afternoon/Early Evening Open Thread

Why are YOU voting Republican?

And if you're NOT stomping out the door and voting Republican, but want to be heard on FISA anyway, think about joining the MyBarackObama.com group Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right. With 2300+ members joining just since Thursday, it's near cracking into the top ten largest groups on the site. Why not chime in? [Kagro X]

Book Review: Feld's and Wilcox's "Netroots Rising"

Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics
By Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox
Praeger Publishers
Westport, CT: 2008
230 Pages, $39.95

... we believe that once people get a taste of activist, netroots democracy it will be difficult--if not impossible--to convince them to return to mass media passivity.

When Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox speak, political activists everywhere should listen. And luckily for us, they've come together to share their vast online organizing experience -- Feld as the founder of Raising Kaine, Wilcox as premier online communications director for various national campaigns -- in the splendid Netroots Rising, a chronicle of war stories and lessons learned from the trenches of the nascent online movement.

Make no mistake: This book is simply the best account of the origin and mission of the netroots out there, bar none, in any medium.

It's a terrific read on every level. First off, it's simply storytelling at its best. Feld and Wilcox manage to juggle different storylines--the Draft Clark movement/campaign, the Draft Webb movement/campaign, Texas redistricting, just to name a few--and write about them with an immediacy and clarity that keep you on the edge of your seat ... even when you know how it ends. The glimpses behind the scene of the personalities, frustrations and debates over tactics are revelatory and gripping, even for high-information political junkies. The authors bounce back and forth between the different storylines fairly easily, keeping a chronological feel to the work as a whole even as they face the difficulty of jumping from Texas to Virginia, from national to local. This is no mean feat, and while some of this switching is slightly jarring, it's hard to see how the information could have been structured any differently and still come together as a coherent whole.

Secondly, the authors, between the two of them involved intimately with a wide variety of campaigns, still manage to walk that thin line between idealism and pragmatism that we all try to straddle. They document the nitty gritty of working a netroots campaign, trying to get a voice inside tightly structured operations, fighting for a larger voice in the top-down, old-fashioned hierarchy of traditional campaigns. Yet they also manage to retain enough objectivity to realize the netroots, citizen-based-only model is not the entire answer to political intractability, and that a pro-am approach is best. And the problem of integration of bottoms-up forces with professional strategists is one of the primary focuses of the book, as it happens.

With the Draft Clark movement, they say, we witnessed what happens when the people-powered aspect is completely shut out once the candidate commits and puts himself in the hands of the "experienced." The Draft Clark movement was remarkable for its early energy and astounding accomplishments, yet the citizen army that evolved around it was completely dismissed once the whole deal became real, respectable and "serious."

In contrast, the Draft Webb movement (spearheaded by Feld, who amazingly quit a long-term career to throw his lot in with the campaign), did a better job--though still far from perfect-- in channeling the energy and commitment of its passionate volunteers. This relationship between traditional politicking and the new brand associated with the rise of the modern people-powered movement is tracked and revisited repeatedly in Netroots Rising in all the various instances the authors address.

The work also excels in its conscientious reportorial standards. The opinions and experiences of Feld and Wilcox alone would be worth hearing, but what pushes the book into "must read" territory for the practical progressive is their interviewing prowess with all manner of people associated with both the netroots and traditional campaigns. Volunteers who'd never dreamt of activism tell their own tales of political awakening alongside political professionals, like Glen Maxey of Texas, state legislator and long-time activist. Both the Clark and Dean campaigns, of course, were hothouses for early grassroots and netroots activism, with lineages reaching deep into the current blogosphere, and many familiar names pop up with spot-on observations: Jerome Armstrong, Matt Stoller, Markos and a host of others. Even operatives from the "other side" are interviewed, like Jon Henke, the unfortunate soul in charge of George Allen's online campaign who faced the infamous onslaught of the Virginia liberal blogosphere in the wake of "macaca." The diverse opinions and experience the authors sought out really lend a richness to this book that would have been lacking otherwise.

Further, the writers' total immersion in the culture and aims of the netroots allows them to articulate its passions in a way that outsiders covering the phenomenon simply fail to do (as evidenced in the succinct blockquoted bit that opens this review). Both strategically and linguistically, they roll out sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter, that perfectly captures the ethos of what the netroots is committed to accomplishing: the tactic of inflicting "forced errors" on a weak opponent, of leading the traditional media to a story and making it drink, of tapping unexpected talents wherever they may arise and connecting them to the larger progressive infrastructure.

Above all, the book is handbook of practicality—and it doesn’t end at giving you tips on what works, but actively illustrates success with examples and explanations so that the reasoning behind it is apparent ... and more readily replicable.

Most importantly to the future of the modern progressive movement, Feld and Wilcox are able to objectively examine what goes right and what goes wrong when professional staff, grassroots volunteers and netroots enthusiasts come together. It's a new frontier, one fraught with possibilities for failure, jealousy and misunderstanding, but these two netroots veterans manage to keep a level-headed balance between realistic expectations and inspirational goals. While they consistently take pride in the success of their wired part of the movement, they recognize that in order to fulfill its full potential, an integration between institutionalized politics and people-powered movements must occur, and that blogs--in all their gradations of variety, activism and different shades of serving as media--are still in an exciting phase of evolution. Their authorial insights are invaluable, thought-provoking and constructive.