We never saw it coming.
Why are we still hearing this:
Bonus link: Internet empowers grass-roots politics, in the Seattle Times, features both Sifry brothers.
out of some quarters, when this:
And meanwhile, unknown to Alex and me and Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum and most operatives of the Democratic Party, the important campaign was the one we were barely watching at all. This one was taking place in "low church" pews and the basements of Catholic Churches; on Christian radio and among prayer groups. It was a ground-level meatspace operation that may have left cybernetic traces, but not where we, the vaunted blogosphere, were looking.
hits it right on the head. While we were typing crap into windows, obsessively refreshing Kos, and hanging around in the self-congratulatory chambers of interactive democracy, the Republics were out organizing actual living, breathing, animate people to travel to a location, vote, and win the fucking election.
And we missed the whole fucking thing, because their grassroots stained your knees. Talk about your end-run.
The real story is NOT connected democracy. It's a part of it, but it's not the whole story that everybody online wants it to be. The story remains democracy, as it always has.