Roots

The news today is that Tom DeLay will resign from the House in June. Seeing that kind of disarray in the GOP stirs the Democratic partisan in my breast. So much so that I feel compelled to contribute to the latest circular firing squad.

Over at Tiberius and Gaius Speaking, Patrick Smith makes some good points about the structural problems facing the Democrats. I agree with most of what he writes and you should, as they say, read the whole post. But even though my nitpicking hat is scratchy like sack cloth, I can't help but take issue with this:

The improvements that are needed are almost entirely independent of the netroots vs establishment debate, yet we have all this sound and fury signifying nothing. There is an air of unreality of these discussions, like if you heard people debating how many life preservers there need to be on each lifeboat on the Titanic when you don't have enough lifeboats.
|What ought the netroots be doing?|

A legitimate criticism of the netroots crowd -- and Dean's Iowa disaster amply demonstrated this -- is that they don't really have any idea how to do the practical work of organizing and mobilizing voters. "Write a blogpost and they will come," sometimes seems like the best those folks have, and it sucks.

On the other hand, the establishment doesn't have much of a clue either. The great insight of the netroots folks is that the party can't win by running away from it's base. You can know everything in the world about voter lists, canvassing, and persuadables but as long as the party insists on tacking right at the first sign of Republican hot air it isn't going to be able to recruit volunteers to do the work of building a structure on the ground.