Parade Magazine joins the Netroots parade

Parade Magazine may have been around longer than God. The epitome of old hat, Parade sometimes gets tossed unread in my house. This week I glanced at the cover and started to open and read the cover story about the way cyberspace is on the leading edge of politics and political campaigning. Well, there wasn't anything new to me, but here's the link in case you want to check it out.

You'll note that our old friend Simon Rosenberg of NDN is quoted as the authority on what's up.

Playing for keeps: progressive strategy

Thanks to a brief intro on DailyKos that caught my eye, here is the latest rendition by our gurus, the NDN gang of Simon Rosenberg and Peter Leyden (the rest of the NDN gang is Joe Garcia), of their vision of the future. It's like 1932, and we're embarking on a half-century of government by the good guys. Check out their article in Mother Jones.

We will be required to work like dogs (quoting Debbie Wasserman Schultz) to win the elections along the way, but otherwise the cards are stacked in our favor.

To learn more details, drop in on the ndn.org web site and be prepared to stay and study for a while.

And if you are dubious about their guru status, I refer you to "The Argument," the recent book by Matt Bai, about progressive politics since the '04 election.

"The Argument" on my bedside table

Here's another one of those books that says we Democrats are struggling to define our program for the future. Reviewed in the NY Times on Tuesday, "The Argument" by Matt Bai is my current political reading. The subtitle is "Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics."

Bai was a co-moderator of the presidential debate forum at the YearlyKos bloggers convention in Chicago early this month, and is clearly well-versed in the short history of the netroots world and its impact on politics. Those of us who saw Simon Rosenberg's presentation last spring on the dawn of the new politics will be pleased to see that he had an important role in getting concerned people together and leading them toward the Howard Dean wing of the party.

Not too far into the book yet, I'm dubious about Bai's comparing the Democrats to General Motors in the '70s. Seems like apples and oranges to me. Bai is afflicted with the NY Times writer's problem with inapt connections, such as Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat." No, Tom, even if you say so, it's not.

But there seems to be plenty of good history and analysis, and I'm plugging ahead. Sometimes I wonder if this incessant demand that we postulate a new philosophy is a way to keep us from concentrating on analyzing the world and deciding how to fix it. Philosophize, or act? Is that the question?