Netroots Ninnies Out of Touch With Reality

Kristen Powers notes that radical netroots activists are badly out of touch with reality on the top problems facing the country:

ASK passers-by on any street in America what their top issue is for the upcoming presidential election, and they'll all answer the same thing: the Foreign Service Intelligence Act.

Gas prices, home foreclosures, the Iraq war - all pale in comparison. Single mothers gathered at the laundromat are all talking about one thing: FISA.

And if you get them to stop yammering on about immunity for telecoms, you won't be able to shut them up about their next favorite outrage: Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public financing.

Don't believe it? Then - unlike many left-wing bloggers and activists, known as the "net roots" - you're in touch with reality.

One top liberal blogger opined last week that Obama's drop in a recent Newsweek poll resulted from his vote for a compromise on FISA, the intelligence surveillance law.

Ridiculous: The average American voter can't describe what FISA is.

Meanwhile, a virtual mutiny is taking place on Obama's campaign Web site, which is swamped with angry complaints that Obama has sold out his "base."

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they're a loud anomaly in a party that's wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

And every poll in existence confirms that what the folks in the party's actual base care about is the economy and the Iraq war.

It's high gas prices, not electronic snooping, that have most Americans on edge.

Powers is absolutely right about the core issues of concern to rank and file Americans, although the question of whether or not the netroots constitutes the party's "base" is an analytical and empirical one.

Certainly, in terms of real voting Americans, in cities and towns across the country, the notion of being part of the "netroots" is completely alien or logically preposterous for workaday Democrats.

Yet, officials in the Democratic Party treat the radical online hordes as a significant factor in their electoral coalitions.

If Markos Moulitsas, and others, like Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald, are not genuinely a part to the Democratic Party base, it's incumbent on leaders in the party establishment to formally renounce them for what they are: Online bullies intent to move the country to the far left of the spectrum, drastically out of the mainstream.

I don't think the Democrats will do so, and although Barack Obama continues to throw his far left-wing liabilities under the bus, he's not gone far enough in giving folks like the Kos-kiddes the boot.