Kos has made history - big history.
Personally, I have been waiting for a moment like this since the Web began to be online, back in the early '90s. I had been working in local grassroots political organizing in Austin, Tx through the '80s and saw that the Web had a great potential to overturn an obnoxious paradigm that had seized the Democratic Party and rendered it intellectually moribund nationally and at the state level by dismissing the grassroots organizers of a previous era in favor of high dollar experts.
I worked media, using skills from a former job as a weekly newspaper ink-stained wretch. Most of this was unpaid, partly paid or theoretically almost paid until I had a brush with professional campaign consulting. Then I saw the problem that the Democratic Party would be paralyzed by for a long time up close and personnel. I quit and ended up driving a cab.
But I got excited about the WWW and developed a web site for a city council candidate (Jackie Goodman) in 1993. Back then, one of the first online discussion board communities had been developed in Austin (Deja News.) It was a particularly nasty campaign between the progressive Goodman and a developer candidate who believed in throwing the kitchen sink,the dishes, and the garbage at her opponent. Seeing this as too much white water to navigate through, the campaign manager (herself a web designer) pulled the plug on the website. There were, after all barely 50,000 people with email addresses in Austin back then.
The 2003/2004 Dean campaign was a great moment for hopes born a decade earlier. I was able to organize volunteers across a whole county who could
trade Excel spreadheets as email attachments! We could coordinate Meetups through a website!
Woohoo!
It has taken awhile, but this website, among other blog sites and a whole variety of internet-based end-runs around conventional wisdom constipation has helped to create an historic, historic moment.
That a community organizer working with Saul Alinsky's methods in Chicago could rise to become a US Senator as fast as Obama did is pretty astounding.
For such a person to become the nominee of the party is really off the scale!
I'm brushing off tears of joy!
We busted the goddamed paradigm of paralysis!
Clinton ran a campaign based on the expertise and best practice experience of the consultant-driven era. She ran it hard and tough and did the best that can be done with that.
Obama ran a campaign that engaged the netroots, worked the problem at the grassroots level and developed a kind of open-source approach to winning caucuses and primaries. He raised a spectacular, historic war chest primarily from online donors - who ARE NOT TAPPED OUT!
Not only that, but the drive to turn "red" states "blue" and drive out both Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats from Congress also promises to be a blowout.
This means pretty much that any campaigns in the future that want to be effective will have to adopt the model from the Obama primary campaign, meaning that the netroots will be very key.
One of the first images I can remember is of John Kennedy being inaugurated. My first grade teacher thought that the class would benefit by forgetting the regular routine and watching that instead.
I hope that there are first grade teachers out there who will be able to bring a TV into their classes for the inauguration of Barack Obama.
I can't hardly wait. Kos should be standing there with him, or at least be able to blog from an inaugural ball.