The Congressional Management Foundation has just released a useful new report showing that online townhall-type meetings connecting Members of Congress with constituents can have dramatic effects on improving constituent approval of their representatives. Participation in such events can also substantially increase voter turnout and engagement, the study...

Today, President Obama is doing something no sitting U.S. President has done before. He is using his massive network of grass-roots supporters, which has been undergoing a reboot since Election Day, to go between the legs of Members of Congress and generate pressure from below...

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Late Monday night in England, the Guardian posted a strange article reporting that...

It looks like Organizing for America, President Obama's de facto field organization based at the DNC, is ramping up its efforts to demonstrate support for health care reform. Last week I took a look at OFA's online directory of upcoming health care canvassing efforts, and found 561 events. Now...

I wouldn't normally bother to wade into the the fevered discussion currently happening on the Right over Barack Obama's purported ties to ACORN, domestic terrorists, and so on, but Stanley Kurtz, one of the lead theorists of all of this, over on National Review Online, has done me the favor...

Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its...

Building on Monday's post about the scattered but telling signs of public opposition to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposal--and the complete lack of organic online support for it, anywhere, here's an update on what was bubbling yesterday.

First, and most telling, is the...

Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton is the first time an insurgent has beaten the establishment candidate in the Democratic primaries since Jimmy Carter in 1976. This is interesting and important for all kinds of reasons. One, as I've written before, is that it suggests that the era of Big...

Ralph Nader is running for president, again. But he has a problem: he doesn't understand the web as well as the web understands him. Message to Ralph: It's not the 1970s any more. It's not even the 1990s any more.

In 2000, when Nader made his first serious...

If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly. (On the Republican side, it's harder to make such a...

Every four years, about a year or so before the presidential election, a crack opens in the two-party road to the White House, and suddenly everyone is talking about the possibility of a serious Independent Candidate for the presidency. Something in our dysfunctional political process seems to conjure the Independent...

Danny Glover of Technology Daily, who also writes the Beltway Blogroll for National Journal, has a post up claiming to have found the "First Blog Scandal of Campaign 2008," but in my humble opinion it's much ado about nothing.

The John Edwards campaign has hired Amanda...

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing another of its ongoing reports tracking Americans' use of the internet today (and someone leaked me an advance copy), and this report contains some really important news:

* More than 60 million people (31% of all Americans online) say they were...

Thomas Jefferson memorably said, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government," but these days a big part of the problem with that admirable notion is that we're glutted with information and it's hard to take it all in, let alone stay focused. And...

As Tom DeLay, the most powerful man on Capitol Hill for the past twelve years, prepares to quit his office in disgrace, it's startling that he still has no idea why he became the #1 symbol for corruption in Congress. In his exit interview with Time magazine, he says:

We...

Congress Meets Wall Street.

We made this poster a few years ago (with the help of a brilliant graphics designer named Chris Foss). Unfortunately, it's as relevant as ever.

Want to do something about it? You can start by adding your...

The long-running scandal of business-as-usual in Washington--the selling of access, influence, legislative favors, regulatory interventions and straightforward raids on the U.S. Treasury by public representatives to wealthy private bidders--is being mis-framed as a "lobbying scandal." As a result, there's a real danger that all we're going to get is some...

Dan Tynan at the Witlist blog has boiled the Abramoff-DeLay scandal down to a level that even a pre-schooler could understand. He calls his piece "Tom DeLay Denies All Charges (As Told by Dr. Suess)." It starts:

That Abramoff!
That Abramoff!
I do...

When will one of those charitable organizations who are now being showered with unwanted campaign contributions from Jack Abramoff and his clients turn around and tell their would-be benefactors, "we don't want your dirty money"? Why do they so willingly act as money-launderers? Or, at a minimum, why don't...