Monday, August 01, 2005
Paul Hackett And The Power Of The Blogosphere
As I write this, Paul Hackett, a heretofore unknown Marine Corps Major, Iraq war veteran, and attorney, is poised to shock the living daylights out of a lot of people. (You can help him do do so. Just go here.) We're talking about a Congressional District that is normally so solidly Republican, they didn't bother to Diebold it. What's amazing is how the netroots were able to a) mobilize quickly, and b) take the GOP utterly by surprise. b) is actually more astonishing than a), as the Republicans have had two solid years to watch what Howard Dean hath wrought. You'd think that the second the call went out on Eschaton and Kos that the RNC would have immediately mobilized to counter it. We can't count on them continuing to be that stupid. But then again, maybe we can. Now that I think about it, the national GOP only got involved after it was apparent that their own version of the netroots wasn't coughing up the simoleons for Schmidt -- I think she'd managed only about $10K online before the NRCC/RNC/etc. stepped in last week. (Hell, as of a week ago -- with the blogosphere's Hackett campaign already going at full throttle -- the national GOP still hadn't done diddly to help her out.) Or it could be that they still -- still -- don't take the netroots seriously. In which case, the guys they have monitoring Kos and Eschaton must be feeling rather like Von Rundstedt helplessly waiting for Adolf to wake up so he could get Hitler's go-ahead to deploy the two panzer divisions at Normandy.
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