One further note on cold hard cash money from last night's session in Manhattan that had to do with the future of the left's grassroots in the Obama era.

A question from the crowd asked just how grassroots groups can get funding these days. Demos' Ben Barber made the point that social movements depend on social capital more than capital capital. Still, money's nice. The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel namechecked ActBlue as a model that has worked on the electoral side of Democratic politics (to the tune of $122 million since 2004 and counting). KVH suggested that a similar model might work for grassroots/non-profit groups. You might also see a distributed, small-dollar model work for progressive media outlets -- in a few clicks, for example, you might drop five bucks for the Nation, Talking Points Memo, what have you. (It would, in theory, also work on the right side of the spectrum, though there's no ActBlue equivalent in conservative circles.)

It's worth keeping in mind that, as ActBlue reps will tell you, the point of ActBlue isn't to be the PayPal of progressive politics. It's to, to borrow a phrase from them, normalize the act of small-dollar online giving. It becomes something you do online -- you tweet, check Facebook, email some folks, and make a small donation to the politicians/groups/publications you support.

Reps from ActBlue, though, will also tell you that they're going to be consumed by the election through November, so don't necessarily expect something like that to come out of their shop anytime soon.

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: 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.

(Updated to include DFA's actual remarks. They somehow got lost in editing. Sorry for the bother.)

Yesterday we covered how the progressive blogosphere was afire with activity around Florida Democrat Alan Grayson's "money bomb," which has thus far raised, according to a campaign tally, more than $505,000 through the efforts of several progressive blogs (Open Left, Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Digby) and the hitting of email lists of high-profile progressive groups, including MoveOn, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Democracy for America. Discussing the tactic with some smart folks, a question came up. Why launch an all-out online fundraising offensive on behalf of a candidate whose own election isn't for another year (and who happens to be personally wealthy) one day before voters go to the polls in hotly contested elections in New Jersey and Virginia and major gay-related ballot measure votes in Maine and Washington State? Is it an unnecessary distraction, or can the netroots handle doing two or three or four things at once?

It's a worthwhile, if provocative, question that becomes even more interesting when you consider it in the context of an online left made up of blogs big and small as well as network-based organizations whose mailing lists constitute their major -- if not only -- point of political leverage. Here's what Democracy for America's political director Charles Chamberlain had to say...

It's perhaps cliched, but no less true, that Democratic Representative Alan Grayson of Florida is a Rorschach test of contemporary American politics. If you ask people working in politics about the fiery, hard-charging, bulldog-ish Grayson, the responses tend to reflect a view of politics how it should be, in the eyes of the respondent, rather than a close read of the reality of things circa 2009. On the one hand, the wing of the blogosphere that grew out of Iraq War-resistance, a.k.a. the netroots, tend to love Grayson's spitfire approach that has him boiling down the Republican health care plan to a recommendation that the sick "die quickly."

But on the other, what you might call the political establishment, or "villagers" in netroots-speak, bristles at Grayson. And it's not just because Grayson wears purple suits and American flag ties (although, let's be honest -- that probably doesn't help). The sentiment seems to be that Grayson, ideology aside, crosses the invisible yet sacred line of acceptable behavior expected from an elected official. Election prognosticator Stuart Rothenberg, after mocking Grayson as a pompous, Deuteronomy-spouting show-off, says that Grayson is on track towards being out of a job come next year's election. The New York Times has called him "the liberals' problem child." Even New York Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner, no quiet mouse himself, called Grayson "one fry short of a Happy Meal" before backing off.

All of which adds up to make today's "Money Bomb" from Grayson a compelling demonstration of resistance to the conventional wisdom from Grayson's allies. Grayson is today blogging on Daily Kos and Crooks & Liars, and getting backup from the likes of Digby, once-congressional candidate Darcy Burner, and the folks on Open Left (whose co-founder, Matt Stoller, now works with Grayson in the House), as well as the progressive groups MoveOn and Democracy for America, all to the ends of a simultaneous fundraising blitz. It's a team effort, and is shaping up to be a considerable show of force. Grayson's team set as a goal $4o0,000, and the total reflected on Grayson's new CongressmanWithGuts.com hub is, at the moment, $402,000. Some $300,000 of that has come through ActBlue, via the collection of individual fundraising pages set up to fill Grayson's coffers (though it's not entirely clear that all that money was raised today, and wasn't in the bank pre-money bomb).

Of course, you don't have to even be that insightful to predict that Grayson's rally of support amongst the online left can and will be flipped around by his critics to be a liability, as a demonstration that he's more popular with the netroots than he is with the voters in his Orlando area district. There probably won't be any silencing Grayson's critics until and unless those voters re-up his job assignment come next election day.

UPDATE: ActBlue announces that Rob Miller has been fundraising on the site at a rate of $7 per second since Joe Wilson's outburst Wednesday night. The mean contribution size, says the company in a press release, has been $36. ActBlue chair Matt DeBergalis: "This is what ActBlue was built to do."

Rob Miller is a man who can spot a moment he sees one, it seems. South Carolina Democrat Miller -- also a man lucky enough to be set up as the main challenger to the guy who happened to shout "You lie!" at Barack Obama during Wednesday health address to the assembled House and Senate, has redirected his official campaign site -- RobMillerforCongress.com, so that it now jumps directly to the fundraising hub ActBlue.

Miller no doubt had some digital way for people to drop money into his campaign coffers on his old, own website. But ActBlue is where the magic is right now, and Miller knows enough to know it. Since Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst two nights ago, Miller has been the recipient of a rather remarkable $717,000 in fundraising through ActBlue, that unglamorous yet core piece of Democratic infrastructure...

The full fury of the progressive netroots has turned on Minnesota Republican congressman Michelle Bachmann -- and it might put her House seat in jeopardy; The National Political Do Not Contact Registry's Shaun Dakin has picked up on the Twitter Vote Report idea and proposed using Twitter to track the automated campaign calls that have been in the news of late; The news today is that the Obama campaign raked in $150 million last month. That's a ton of money, and it frees Obama to compete in parts of the country where the math heretofore didn't make sense for a Democrat; and a good deal more.

The LA Times has the back story on Anne Kilkenny. Anne Kil-who? Oh, you know, the Alaskan who wrote an email critiquing her fellow Wasillan Sarah Palin that landed in your inbox at least one thousand times just after the Palin pick was announced; Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert is slamming right-leaning bloggers for their quixotic campaign to tie an anti-Palin YouTube clip to the Obama campaign, despite, well, the total lack of evidence; The Obama campaign has taken heat for supposedly giving short shrift to progressive bloggers. Now, one of their own has tried to reach out; and much more.

The folks out in Mountain View jump into political waters with both feet; the Democratic fundraising hub ActBlue has raised what is technically known in the field as "gobs and gobs of cash;" we indulge our Olympic obsession; l'affair Edwards exposes a rift in the liberal blogosphere; a former Clinton Administration official challenges McCain's recollection of his tech accomplishments on Capitol Hill; and quite a tremendous amount more.

Obama reaches 2 million donors, BarelyPolitical barely keeps my attention, McCain's tech policy review, techPresident is honored with a nomination, Obama and McCain's YouTube channels