(I’m promoting this to balance out the fact that I took Dean to task on this blog a few days ago — well, that and of course because, as usual, Vermoter writes a great post that folks should read. – promoted by odum)

I saw the War Room this past year. And seeing the contrast between the youthful and sincere Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos during the ’92 election, and the establishment celebrity pundits they’ve become, is more than a little sad.

Zack Exley, writing on Huffington Post yesterday (and cross-posted at Daily Kos), chastises Begala for his less than warm comments about Dean’s DNC’s 50 State Strategy.

He writes, in part…

Your comments came as part of a series of attacks on Dean and the DNC from big-name members of your Clinton Class of ’92. A whole generation of new Democratic activists finds these attacks totally bewildering and appalling.

You should be up there on TV celebrating that we finally have a DNC who understands that winning means building real power and standing for something. Your entire career has been about teaching Democrats to “stand for something.” But, coming from a communications background, maybe you just don’t understand the “building real power” part of the equation. So let me try to reach you on that point.

Starting with George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, the Republican Party slowly built a powerful grassroots machine, county by county, year by year, across the whole country. That “50 State” grassroots machine trounced us, achieving the highest voter turnout of any candidate ever. On our side, the combined efforts of fifteen separate swing state “Coordinated Campaigns,” the national Kerry campaign, and all the 527’s put together couldn’t match the work of one unified, well-organized political party.

I spent the last couple months of the campaign in the field, in almost every one of the targeted swing states. On our side it was utter chaos on the ground. Both the party organizations and the 527 organizations had been slapped together in a few hurried months. Operations varied in quality from state to state, and even county to county, but overall it was a disorganized mess — a disservice to the record hundreds of thousands of passionate volunteers who threw themselves into the campaign. On the Republican side, their organizations had been formed years before the election, and scaled up during the campaign under the tested and stable leadership of organizers rooted in their home states and local communities. (It is worth noting that the AFL-CIO’s voter contact program ran very smoothly and effectively, having been built slowly and consistently over several cycles.)

And Exley can speak with some authority on this.

After the frustrating chaos during the 2004 election he describes above, he took the time to publicly lay out a detailed blueprint for how to merge the top-down/bottom-up divide. And it’s the only comprehensive one I’ve ever seen.

I’ve always been surprised how this particular essential  meta-discussion is so absent throughout lefty blogland.

Though it’s no longer available online, I snagged his very persuasive “Letter to the Next DNC Chair” from January 27, 2005, for a brief netroots primer I put together a bit ago for Scudder Parker‘s campaign.

Really excellent stuff. But, perhaps because of some feud with Kos that I never knew the details of, it has largely vanished down the memory hole.

Exley, Peter Daou and James Boyce are some of the very few people who saw the Kerry operation close-up and who’ve been strongly advocating for the netroots perspective on Huffington Post and elsewhere.

VERMONT-SPECIFIC ADDENDUM: As an aside, it should be noted that Scudder’s campaign has apparently given up – at least for now – on the idea of a blog.

And a further troubling sign for us netroots advocates is that I entered a comment on Bernie’s blog on a thread on May 10th. Nothing showed up for an entire day, but the only one they decided to post was an anti-Bernie rant. It was simply a comment on Tarrant’s “You don’t have a million dollars… You’re a loser!” comment to Peter Freyne. This could easily be an oversight, but I doubt I’ll take the time to contribute to Progressive America any time soon…

I don’t like the direction of this trend, if that’s what I’m seeing, and I hope it’s just a temporary retreat from opening up the dialogue.

Cross-posted at What’s the Point?