NP: Tony Williams, Ultimate Tony Williams

I'm curious to see if the Obama honeymoon is really coming to an end, as Kos himself is decrying my senator's comments on what happenes now with the Iraq funding bill.

This cuts to the heart of one of the fundamental problems with netroots, for me, and that is that the loudest of the bloggers seem to fundamentally disagree with the notion that being a lawmaker in Washington is somehow different from being an activist behind a keyboard. Which explains why the guys Kos seems most fond of right now are Gore and Edwards, because neither of them actually have to vote on things. Russ Feingold seems to the one of very few in the Senate, at least, who can walk that line, but even if it's a misplaced unwillingness to challenge the conventional wisdom, that conventional wisdom is a way of life, and I think it's maybe too easy for bloggers to assume that you can just wake up and decide to do things differently. But then again, I'm a "subvert the system" guy rather than an "overthrow the system" guy.

This seems of a piece with the idea that there's a gap between online activism and offline governing (including our part, the voting) seems to be closing, but there's still a gap. There was one good Washington Post article over the weekend that highlighted this with regard to Obama, although David Broder seemed to negate that by (incorrectly, in my opinion) dismissing Howard Dean as a media-manufactured story rather than a failure of the online enthusiasm to translate to offline voting behavior.

Broder's piece, of course, underlines the reciprocality here. If the bloggers reject the notion that Washington works the way that it works, the mainstream media cling perhaps a little too tightly to that notion at the same time. Which goes a long way to explain why those two factions dislike each other so much.