Crashing the Gate

Power to the people with a political takeover plan
Los Angeles Times
Lee Drutman
May 30, 2006
In a given week, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's progressive blog, Daily Kos, receives more than 3 million visits, making it one of the most widely read political blogs in the world, and earning its proprietor regular calls for advice from Democratic Party leaders. Not bad for somebody who just four years ago was a Silicon Valley dropout with no real political experience. Now Moulitsas, along with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com (the DD stands for "Direct Democracy"), has put down some thoughts in a more traditional medium — a book.
In Crashing the Gate, the two are not shy about what they hope to accomplish: nothing but an all-out "people-powered" takeover of the Democratic Party — which, they are firmly convinced, is the only way to take America back from the conservatives currently ruining it. "To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson," they write, "the tree of a political party must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of reformers and insiders." So begins a chapter titled "Civil War." ...
Crashing the Gate is brash and infuriating, as it should be. The progressive blogosphere is starting to feel its own strength — in the continued growth of Web traffic, in its powerful fund-raising capacity, and in the rise of its man, Howard Dean, as Democratic National Committee chairman. As Eli Pariser of Moveon.org's political action wing wrote in December 2004 (after helping to raise a few hundred million dollars online): "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." Crashing the Gate is a powerful salvo in that battle. And as such, it commands attention.
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I have not read it, I just got curious enough to go read a few reviews. The plan the reviews describe seems to require that the entrenched big money influences be displaced by grass roots activism. Good luck with that.
CB
Used on Amazon for $0.45 and up.