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Obama and the Netroots

This is Chris Bowers' strong suit. Read the whole thing to understand this:

It feels like the butterfly effect, the Frankenstein monster, or some sort of self-mutating computer virus. The political zeitgeist that the progressive blogosphere first seized upon five or six years ago was released into the population at large and came back, unexpectedly, as the Barack Obama campaign. That energy certainly didn't turn out with the same rhetorical approach it started with, but otherwise it is nearly structurally identical. In other words, the whole people-powered thing turned out exactly the way we planned it would, only that it sounds a little different. It is like a bunch of loose molecules forming a cloud, once the energy that started almost ten years ago grew, it took on a like of its own, reached a critical mass, and seized onto the first available nucleus. Soon enough, we will find out whether that could covers the Democratic Party in a flood.

Follow-on analysis here from Matt Stoller.