Eli Sanders examines why one netroots candidate failed:
Liberal bloggers do face serious long-term challenges in reaching a mass audience that includes swing voters, but it doesn't help their cause when so many of their current media-relations problems are self-inflicted. While they and their favored candidates may indeed be some of the smartest people in the political arena at any given moment, you don't win friends and influence mainstream reporters (or blue-collar voters in the 8th District) by giving them the very clear sense that you think they're stupid…
Courtney Martin writes about the spectacle of volunteer work and wonders if it’s actually doing any good:
Like Juan Ponce DeLeon's mythological fountain of youth, the Lower 9th Ward has become upper-middle-class America's source of feel-good absolution. Do-gooders flood down to New Orleans, their bags packed full of old T-shirts and their minds packed full of altruistic dreams. They want to build houses, watch them spring up from the dirt as they do on Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Indeed, they genuinely want to help people.
But the darker side of all of this well-intentioned activism is that it has created a revolving door of services and support in a parish that is in dire need of a strategic plan.
And Ezra Klein considers some of the ironies of foodie politics:
Good food -- the sort [Alice] Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the sort of people who already eat at Waters' restaurant. Thus, in promoting an agenda that benefits poor people with little access to fresh food, Waters tends to communicate mainly with rich people interested in fine dining.
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--The Editors
