Netroots vs. Old Experienced Democratic Hands

Chris Bowers wrote an interesting rebuttal to the complaints by Mike McCurry and Joe Klein. Appaerently McCurry and Klein are unhappy that the Netroots are out here making noise and disagreeing with the conventional wisdom as delivered by the Old Experienced Democratic Hands.

Bowers takes them on at the strawman-level and demonstrates the extent to which they are attacking pure straw. Then Georgia10 at Daily Kos riffs off of Bowers, and Kos himself throws in a word or two. All of this is interesting in itself. But Chris goes on to define and explain the new conventional wisdom which the Netroots are working to impress on the old time Washington experts.

• Long term fifty state strategy versus short term selective targeting;
  
• Being a partisan Democrat versus an ideological Democrat of some sort;
  
• Directly challenging Republicans versus letting Republicans self-destruct;
  
• Changing progressive infrastructure versus changing progressive policy;
  
• Altering the conventional wisdom versus accepting the conventional wisdom.

This refers back to an earlier post by Chris Bowers.

I am not going to attempt to summarize all of these references. It would be beyond my understanding (yet) to do them justice. But for anyone who is curious, this is a good set of writings to explain the battle between the disagreement between the inside-the-beltway Democrats and the Netroots.