How big are the right-roots? And how do they stack up against the net-roots? I've been asking that question of various people lately, and also looking at some of the metrics available, as both sides of the American political spectrum continue to grow and flex their online muscles in this turbulent season. Here's some relevant data regarding their respective online donor bases.

Credit: Photo by quinnums showing PCCC activists in the process of delivering an "Honor Kennedy" petition to the Massachusetts legislature

The Nation's Chris Hayes does a short summary of the efforts of the online (and, of course, offline) left to reinsert a public health care option back into the public debate long after official Washington had passed the policy through its internal mechanisms and deemed it unworthy, a provocative topic we've hit on in the past. Here's Hayes:

In the wake of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts and the chaotic, shellshocked response from Democrats, PCCC [Progressive Change Campaign Committee] saw a vacuum and moved to fill it. "People didn't know what to do," says PCCC's Stephanie Taylor, "so we showed them through polls, which is the language they understand." PCCC commissioned polls of Massachusetts Obama voters who had voted for Brown, as well as voters in ten frontline Democratic Congressional districts, and found widespread support for the public option in each. In concert with PCCC and its partners Democracy for America (DFA) and Credo Action, two freshman Democratic House members, Jared Polis and Chellie Pingree, wrote a letter calling on Reid to include the public option.

As Hayes mentions in passing, there's an argument to be made that this episode is far more about process than policy, and that the gains of the online left here shouldn't be dismissed just because of the -- quite likely -- possibility that a public option won't be the outcome of this process anytime soon. Forward-looking progressive activists are learning how to wrangle polling data, as Hayes mentions. They're learning how to effectively whip Congress. They're fundraising online, in amounts that make their efforts worthy of the attention of their allies and adversaries alike. For years now, there hasn't been much in the way of downside to Democratic politicians moving centerward while they're on the floor of the House and Senate, and as much as the growth of the online left has been a growth of a progressive online left, the moment has probably come to see if the "netroots," for lack of a better term, is a new political force with any might.

It's no coincidence that PCCC sounds an awful lot like DCCC, with the "Democratic" label swapped for "progressive." Much of the anger of the online left over the last decade, give or take, has come from the fact that the powers-that-be in the Democratic establishment have gone beyond simply recognizing the different, and often difficult, local contexts that Democratic politicians face in their districts and states to simply letting any old body cut any old deal with any old interest group. Some of the potential power of a group like the PCCC is that they are calling into question establishment entities like the DCCC's raison d'être.

Paired with a growing skill at leveraging the resources opened up by the Internet -- distribution channels, fundraising, phonebanking -- the possibility is that the netroots can compile a real political cost to backing off from progressive values, particularly where on-the-ground political realities don't, objectively speaking, absolutely require it. Whether or not it can work is very much an open question, but it's worth keeping an eye on Arkansas;* the PCCC has announced that it's going to be backing a primary challenge to anti-public option Senator Blanche Lincoln.

Correction: A finger slip led to re-assigning Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln to the great state of Nebraska.

Credit: Pavlov Museum

While, at this moment in early 2010, a vast majority of Americans believe that the American system of government is broken -- 86%, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll that came out yesterday -- only one in 20 Americans believe that the damage to institutional democracy in the United States is irreparable and the democratic experiment hopeless. Where does that hopefulness find its footing? Of course, the great promise of online politics was, is, that by tapping into the distributed world that the web has helped to cultivate, the channels might open up between the electorate and the elected, and great waves of participatory democracy might gush forth. Maybe the very nature of representative government isn't altered as a result, the thinking behind distributed democracy goes. But in this new world order, Congress and others in office would be forced into a relationship of greater accountability. Good, responsive members of Congress would flourish in a system of incentives that wasn't so dominated by the wealth-funded interests of a few or the hollow arguments of those with the establishment standing to get their voices heard.

There is, you may have noticed, a fairly raging debate taking place amongst those progressives armed with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection over the future of the health care bill. On the chance that you haven't been closely tracking the blow-by-blow, we present to you a quick guide to the players and the arguments they're making over whether the health care package emerging from the Senate's legislative process is something worth saving, or a botched mess deserving of a quick and merciless death.

But first, a brief synopsis of the state of things. It's facile to frame this debate as one between political activists and policy wonks. Firedoglake, the liberal blog hub that most fully fleshes out the vision of an activist/journalistic hybrid operating in the progressive space, a.k.a. the "netroots," has become ground zero for the debate. FDL's Jane Hamsher has been a dominant voice in what's being called the "Kill the Bill" camp. And certainly, arrayed on the other side of the spectrum are those folks who probably consider themselves journalists before activists, like the Washington Post's Ezra Klein and Mother Jones' Kevin Drum.

But that quick and dirty division points to something broader. The Better-than-Nothingers see the Senate reform bill as a starting point, fixating on the details of the package to make the case that passage now is demonstrably better for the country, the poor, the underinsured, and the uninsured than no legislative package at all. The political system will turn crude progress into more elegant reform as it goes about its business. The Bill Killers, on the other hand, seem to see this package as entrenching a political system, one that is largely unresponsive to activist influence. They want an overhaul. They want justice. A just system isn't one that further builds up health insurance behemoths and adds fertilizer to the entwinement of government and corporate America. And now, in their judgment, is the right moment to push for a different political and social reality.

With that, here's your quick guide to the intra-left debate taking place over whether health care reform is better than nothing -- or not...

Various members of the netroots, it seemed, turned out in Dupont Circle this weekend to throw snowballs at one another.

The New Republic's Marin Cogan profiles "the blogosphere's man in Congress," otherwise known as first-term Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Central Florida. A taste:

Shortly after taking office, Grayson--recognizable on the Hill for his 6'4" frame, which fills his pinstripe suits and flamboyantly mismatched shirts and ties--began making opposition to the bankers and regulators who precipitated last year's financial collapse the signature issue of his first term. He poached Matt Stoller, co-founder of the OpenLeft site and one of the netroots' most prominent liberal bloggers, to advise him on financial services. "Usually I have to push candidates to become more aggressive," Stoller wrote on his blog after meeting Grayson, "in Grayson's case, he pushed me."

Cogan's brief character sketch of Grayson is intriguing. But one hungers for more. It's not just that Grayson is a darling of the online left, though he is. His candidacy was boosted on blogs including Open Left and Howie Klein's Down With Tyranny, and his persistant but monotonally gentle questioning of Federal Reserve Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman has attracted a startling 1.8 million views on YouTube since mid-May. But you know where at least some number of those views came from? Through an unlikely fan, FoxNews commentator Glenn Beck. Beck embedded the video on GlennBeck.com and praised Grayson for his "fine work being done to keep up on things at the Fed."

Grayson is a different kind of politician, a flamethrower with footnotes, willing to challenge assumptions and be thought of as excessive by his colleagues and the press if it gets the job (at least, what he sees as his job) done. It's probably safe to say that bloggers, left and right, tend to like that sort of thing. Whether that will make for a successful political career is a fascinating, and open, question.

Miss Netroots Nation this year? Perhaps the next best thing to being there, Slate's intrepid Christopher Beam somehow managed to drag himself nearly every single session at the fourth annual assemblage of left-leaning bloggers, held in Pittsburgh last week. Though he did draw the line at "the fifth event on 'messaging.'" That kind of coverage seems nearly impossible, but perhaps Beam walks really, really fast. I'm thinking there was copious Red Bull involved. Anyway, Beam hunted around for a central theme, and came up with this: How does the netroots hold President Barack Obama accountable to the progressive vision he ran on, without providing ammunition and momentum to the other side?

The ever-insightful Digby, reported Beam, cited FDR: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it." In other words, goes the thinking, there is much that liberal bloggers and Obama agree on. Where they can serve is by creating the political momentum to make that change possible. It was the same point that NN '09 keynoter Bill Clinton made when he angrily told a heckler in the audience that the reason his Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy on gay servicemembers fell short because activists on the left failed, not him. The extra-governmental left failed to create the political will in Congress for a smarter and more resilient policy on gay folks in the military, said Clinton. And so, when DADT went out into the world, it got warped and queered into an unworkable approach. Clinton's message to netrooters: Keep Obama in check, for sure. But focus the bulk of your energies on pushing for the change you both want.

In other Netroots Nation news, its been announced that the 2010 gathering will be held July 22-25 in that land of Elvis impersonators and chocolate fountains known as Las Vegas. (Photo credit: Matt Ortega)

Mother Jones interviewsMother Jones interviews Eric Boehlert, author of Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press and a senior fellow at Media Matters. MoJo asks Boehlert whether political bloggers on the left are serving as effective watchdogs now that we've got Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. They are, says Boehlert. He frames his answer by talking of a blogger who blends some journalist, some activist, and some cheerleader:

I think they've been doing a really good job. They've split their time up into three activities. 50 percent of it is just playing defense against the unhinged right wing response on how Obama is a socialist and a Marxist and he wants to take your guns. 25 percent is trying to prod and cheerlead when the administration does something that it likes and that it approves of or maybe has a liberal flavor to it, and the other 25 percent is critiquing the administration. We've seen it on war funding, we've seen it on gay marriage, we've seen it on wire tapping. I think there was this notion, particularly among the conservative critics, to say, 'well Obama is elected, and bloggers are going to roll over and they're just going to be a mouthpiece for the administration.' But that's not what happened and I never thought it would because the blogosphere was never created to be an appendage to the DNC or to cheerlead Democratic politicians. It was always created to give a voice to liberalism in America. Liberal bloggers are still going to do that. I mean, they're happy that a Democrat is in the White House who's more receptive to their priorities and their agenda, but they're not just going to stop because a Democrat is in the White House.

Boehlert doesn't make the connection, but when he says the economics of progressive blogging are "frankly...pretty awful" and with few institutional funders -- well, beyond the omnipotent George Soros, of course (kidding!) -- there's an argument to be made that it's in fact this hybrid journalist-activist-critic-watchdog style of blogging that makes it difficult to match some bloggers with deep-pocketed supporters. At least, traditional funders who are looking to check a box when they write a check. That said, it's difficult to separate out the poor state of political blog funding from the general poor state of the economy, and the disastrous state of news publishing in particular.

"One of the things that I know blogs are best at are debunking myths that can slip through traditional media outlets and [into] the conventional wisdom," said President Barack Obama on a 24-minute conference call late afternoon yesterday with about two dozen progressive bloggers. "And that's why you're going to play such an important role in our success in the weeks and months to come." (I missed the chance to chat with the Prez because I had my first scheduled acupuncture session at the same time. I care about you people a lot, but my back hurts!) The number one "myth" on Obama's hit list these days is the idea that the health care reform legislation he is advocating is expensive, an idea that has gained prominence in recent days because of a Congressional Budget Office report that concluded that the legislation currently being debated would raise the federal deficit. "It's simply not true," said Obama to the bloggers on the call. Beyond myth-busting, was Obama's intention behind making some time in his afternoon schedule for liberal bloggers to shore up those who might be concerned that the bill that passes out of congressional committee might be less progressive than they hope for? Is he looking for bloggers to lean on wavering Democrats, particularly those who appear ready to sacrifice a public option? All that and then some, most likely. Ezra Klein has notes on Obama's reassurance to the assembled bloggers that all will right itself in conference committee between the House and Senate, and the Huffington Post's Sam Smith has more on where the blogger call fits into the larger health care debate.

It might read like a Politics Online attendee list -- Joe Trippi, Zephyr Teachout, Jerome Armstrong, David Sirota, Mike Lux -- but it's actually just some of the big names in online politics behind a new effort called A New Way Forward, aimed at advancing a new approach to how the U.S. deals with the struggling financial industry. Step one in the New Way Forward approach: nationalize the banks. Follow that up with replacing CEOs and wiping out bonuses. Then wrap things up with breaking up banks into more manageable -- and more regulable -- parts. WireTap's Kristina Rizga interviews Tiffiniy Cheng, one of the founders of OpenCongress and a co-creator of the new project. Says Cheng, "I'm really sick of just signing a lot of petitions online. I do think that showing up at a protest or anything else is still the most potent way to express our political power." To that end, NWF is encourage supporters to organize "creative actions" (read protest rallies) in cities across the country this Saturday, April 11th. How popular will the rallies be? We'll see. But one protest at the intersection of of Northern Lights Boulevard and Seward Highway in Anchorage, Alaska has already drawn 55 committed attendees.