One of the things that drive me nuts is the concept that "we" "need" to focus on the key races and focus a finite amount of money on the most competitive races.
What's profoundly wrong with this concept is the idea that there is a fixed sum of money available.
That's just not true, and my wife and I are living proof. We've gone from making contributions in the hundreds of dollars per year to thousands, and then thousands more.
And these contributions are very heavily influenced by the phenomenon that started with Howard Dean, then led to our discovery of Move-on, Kos, Atrios, and the candidates they support.
We are totally uninvolved with our local, state, or national Democratic Party. I'm almost as anti-partisan as nTodd, and my wife has been an Emily's list believer for years, yet really doesn't have much interest in Democratic politics. I have to keep telling her not to like McCain.
But we do have a surrogate son in Iraq now, a conservative and conservationist approach to the world, and a deep hatred of the lying, hypocritical, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist puke that we know as Bushco.
When Atrios or Kos or Robin at Factesque, or Move-on tells us to send money and it makes sense, we have the assets to fight fascism.
And I'm willing to send money to the edge, just as we have routinely and automatically sent a good chunk of money to Greenpeace every month. The center only responds to movement at the edges.