"Netroots Rising" is Beach Reading?

If your taste in political reading is more down in the trenches, where campaigns are actually fought and won, two books are worth your attention. The first, "Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics," was edited by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter, two veterans of that seminal 2004 effort. It features first-person essays from nearly all of the key players on the Dean campaign, and it is a must for anyone who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of merging a classic long-shot bid with the heady madness of the nation's first Internet-powered presidential candidacy.

The second is called "Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics," by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox. Drawing on their own experiences in 2004 (with Dean and the Draft Wesley Clark movement) and the 2006 rise of Jim Webb, the authors update the story told by Teachout et al. Its core is a firsthand description of the Virginia Senate race, where Feld was Webb's director of online fundraising, but the authors use that microcosm to make larger arguments about how politics is being upended by a combination of grass-roots activism and do-it-yourself technology.

Actually, I was Webb's netroots coordinator, although I certainly helped raise money online. And one more minor disagreement; it's not really "do-it-yourself technology" but people using the technology that's available to empower themselves as citizens in our democracy.  Overall, though, it's pretty cool to be put on a beach reading list...maybe Karen at AIAW concurs since she says it "reads almost like a novel?" :)

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