Bloggers and Labor Unite to Primary Dems, Create Space for Obama on the Left
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, February 26 2009
Progressive bloggers like Salon's Glen Greenwald and Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher are teaming up with union groups like SEIU to ramp up a coalition PAC called Accountability Now, reports the New York Times' Jim Rutenberg. The PAC isn't exactly new, though. It sprung up this summer out of opposition to Obama's position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The challenge now for the blogosphere and allies is to convert the power and authority they amassed over these last many years spent in opposition into governing leverage in a Democratic Washington. To that end, the PAC's mission statement reads, "Nothing focuses the mind of a politician on listening to citizens better than a primary." Driving an organization like this is the idea that by planting a flag on the far left (for lack of a better term), the political spectrum shifts so that even centrism is more liberal than it might otherwise be.
Of particular interest for us here: during the FISA fight, Greenwald, Hamsher, and others made use of Obama's own online tools -- in the form of MyBarackObama.com -- to coalesce and express opposition to him from the left.
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