CTG: Roots project post-mortem

Wow, what a fantastic writeup about the Roots Project effort to get a copy of Crashing the Gate into every Democratic congressional office on Capitol Hill.

When we started working on this, it was my opinion that the event mattered as much as the upshot; if the book got shelved as so many gift books no doubt do, our presence and the contributions of the invididuals who bought the books would nonetheless stand out as a demonstration of people-powered politics.  The confluence of events has made this more successful than I had hoped for-Lamont's victory happened the weekend before, and Tester's shortly thereafter. Oh, yes, and there was YKos.  The folks inside the Beltway want to know what to make of the netroots, and this project will help them figure us out.  And, hey, if we keep it up, "them" will become "us."

I also love this passage:

One staffer got in touch with us, through another Congressional office, asking whether we had delivered a copy to her Rep's office.  As Paradox65 says above, everybody got one.  In this case, I happened to have made the delivery. In the process of straightening this out (somebody probably took it home and hadn't fessed up), our contact said that the book is a "hot item."  Another office reported that there's a waiting list for CtG, and the Chief of Staff is next on the list.

One of the media narratives in the traditional press at YearlyKos in Vegas was that our actions sure seemed "mainstream" -- a convention, the fact I have been promoting a book, my appearance on Meet The Press, the attendance of mainstream politicians and candidates, the throwing of parties by Mark Warner and Wesley Clark, and so on. Several reporters asked me how could we claim to be a gate-crashing force if we were behaving in such a "mainstream" fashion.

We've had to crash the gate precisely because the insular DC bubble boys refused to acknowledge that we are the American mainstream. There is so much passion, talent, and ideas outside of Washington, yet it has been shut out of the political and media establishments. The more the DC elite acknowledge and embrace the movement, the less "gate crashing" will be needed.

We don't crash gates because we like to crash gates. That's just merely a means to an end.