Both Philip Baruth and Odum weigh in today with some post-Lieberman loss/Lamont win ruminations…

Philip writes (my emphasis)…

The Lamont race has been a proxy war between both the old media and the new, and the old-school Democratic consultants and the net-roots theorists who are actively seeking to displace them.

Look at the election day coverage yesterday. It was dominated, during the fat part of the voting period, by wall-to-wall coverage of a very shaky claim by the Lieberman camp — that Lamont’s internet crazies had crashed his rather feeble web pages.

Clearly, that coverage had the capacity to sway last-minute voters. Yet almost all media outlets, but particularly those on the Right, worked it throughout the afternoon, not even publishing Lamont denials until evening.

Why? Because the netroots are an upsetting phenomenon. They effectively re-apportion power, bypassing a series of credentialing systems that have been in place since time out of mind.

And Odum fleshes this out a bit (my emphasis)…

The Traditional Media initially tried to pass off the Dean phenom as a fluke - a bunch of crazies temporarily riled up. A simple glitch in their collective narrative of American politics. After Dean did not bolt the Party as many predicted, and his supporters dutifully fell in line behind John Kerry’s miserable run, some pundits even started referring to the Dean movement in a positive light, given that it was now safely consigned (as they thought) into history and therefore rendered harmless and irrelevant to their own, beltway-tethered world.

But fast forward to 2006. Howard Dean is the DNC Chair and - to the chagrin of many - is pushing his 50-state strategy forward relentlessly. And it’s Joe Lieberman who has been rejected by a record turnout of his own state Party and is bolting from the Democratic Party altogether. The right-wing Talking Heads are apoplectic, and the centrist types who pass as the “liberal media” (such as Cokie Roberts) are in a complete tailspin, mired in predictions of Democratic apocalypse, all because their own party has rejected the notion that insiders like them have a special right to dictate to the rank-and-file how they should vote and what’s in their best interests.

At day’s end, the traditional Media’s attempts to marginalize the Lamont phenomenon worked decidedly against them. The relentless narrative was that the Lamont campaign was simply fueled by crazy bloggers - which was obviously untrue (try to imagine, for a moment, rank and file Dems sitting around a Connecticut bar talking about DailyKos). As others have observed, focusing on the blogosphere at all shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the new media. Sure, the lefty political blogs are abig part of it, but there is also Burlington’s Democracy for America and True Majority, the mighty MoveOn.org, the media watchdog groups such as Crooks and Liars and Media Matters, journalism sites such as Raw Story - all leaderless, decentralized, and finally, after a couple years - truly grassroots (and I do not use that term lightly).

In keeping with this idea of true people-powered politics and information - and the integration of both netroots and grassroots…

I (along with some other Vermont bloggers) just got an invitation to have “What’s the Point?” linked from Vermont sections of Congresspedia, a politics wiki now being developed by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation.

The idea is to foster increased involvement by regular citizens to encourage the kind of “leaderless, decentralized… truly grassroots” concept that Odum describes above.

Writing today on her blog on the Sunlight Foundation’s site, Ellen Miller discusses her conversation with Vermont’s own netroots guru, Zephyr Teachout (currently listed as the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation) about the meaning of the Lamont win yesterday and the Washington Post article today about the net/grass relationship…

She writes (my emphasis)…

We agree that the breakthrough for Lamont wasn’t necessarily the use of the Internet but how he used it. Since 2004 candidates have increasingly “used” the internet, but mostly used it as an alien force, not as an aspect of every part of the campaign itself. For a campaign not to use the Internet to amplify everything you do would be like not using the telephone.

The Lamont campaign had a different — and obviously much better — approach. It used the Internet to enable people’s creativity and passions, instead of simply to direct doorknockers and mobilize (though they did that too). They brought to the campaign people with enormous creativity and passion, rather than shunning them. They used techniques like video blogging with people who were really passionate about their candidate. They repeatedly proved that openness in the process of campaigning actually works. This kind of attitude and approach — serve the people who want to work with you, enable them, ala Craig Newmark – is essential for meaningful political participation. And it results in robust involvement of real people in the campaign.

We also can’t overlook the role that political bloggers played in this race, not directly in reaching voters (Zephyr’s hunch is that number of primary voters actually reading blogs would be less than 10 percent) but in how they shaped the race for the national press, which in turn affected local voters as they got a sense of its importance.

So, what do we learn from the experiment of allowing creative, passionate, dedicated people direct access to the many aspects of political activity - from the creation of branding, the dissemination of information, and the framing of the public conversation, all the way to creative, novel approaches for get out the vote efforts?

If you listen to the professional pundit/consulting class, it can only mean one thing…

The death of democracy.

But, to me, and to all of the millions of net and grassroots activists out there, inspired by Lamont’s win, it just might mean the very healthy rise of increased transparency, openness, and participation in the political process.

And perhaps maybe, just maybe, we crazy, unhinged lovers of true democracy, have begun to shape the public discourse a bit.

And maybe, just maybe, the wisdom of Justice Brandies’ famous aphorism (and the inspiration for the Sunlight Foundation name), “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” might have a chance of becoming conventional wisdom…

Even among the Cokie Roberts of this world.

OK, well, a guy can dream, can’t he?