NP: The Police, Message In A Box

I've said it before, and I've said it again. Online communities often overestimate their power and their role, whether it be a community surrounding a TV show, a sports team, or a political party. With regard to the latter, there's an emerging movement online aimed to persuade Democrats sitting on sizable amounts of campaign funds that they don't need in this election cycle to donate about a third of those funds to competitive races for this November 7th.

It's not an unreasonable request, in and of itself, but as Kevin Drum summarizes, not everyone agrees.

And this is the point where the "netroots" crowd starts to piss me off, because now that their idea has been spurned, they're out for blood. Making threats of retribution against people in your own party for not going along with your "outsider" ideas is not exactly the new, enlightened approach the netroots movement has promised, is it? It sounds more like par for the political course.

There have been elements of this attitude problem for a while now, and it's a tough one to dissect, because sometimes the netroots side is right (Dean at the DNC and the 50-state strategy, for one), and sometimes they just seem petulant. But they control the noise machine right now, to the extent that they can rock whatever boat the Dems are currently on. It's probably not as much turmoil as the GOP is going through right now, but it's certainly a story worth watching.