A new high school textbook about American government features a profile of our founder, Markos Moulitsas. I guess that's an indication of how mainstream DailyKos is getting.
More after the jump.
The textbook is American Government: Citizenship and Power, by Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright, from EMC/Paradigm. (Full disclosure: I work for a publisher that recently was bought out by this company. That's how I got an advance look at this book.)
The textbook takes materials from Congressional Quarterly and reworks them for high schoolers. If you think that sounds dull, you should see how lively the book is. If you haven't looked at a high school textbook lately, you'll be surprised how busy they are, with sidebars and references to Web pages with additional content.
This book has a continuing series of full-page Profiles in Citizenship, featuring people who are playing an active role in the way this country is governed. Some of them are officeholders, such as Condoleezza Rice, but one of them (on p. 594) is Markos. The profile describes how he flipped from conservative to progressive and how he started up this blog site. It ends with an inspiring quote from him about the need for involvement.
This theme runs throughout the textbook. The point is that American government works only if citizens get involved. This is both a valuable lesson to impart and a way of justifying the relevance of the subject matter--after all, if government really does flow from the citizenship, then we all should be knowledgeable and involved.
It's ironic that at the sales meeting where the book was presented (I'm not on sales staff), the meeting began with a quick quiz about government (e.g., "True or False: The president appoints the Speaker of the House") that revealed a disappointing level of knowledge among the people in attendance. Maybe if everybody read DailyKos every day they'd be better informed about how this country is run (or mismanaged).