By Monika Bauerlein And Clara Jeffery

In July 2005, Mother Jones sent a writer to a deep-red district in Ohio to follow a candidate in a special House election. For the millions who had mobilized against George W. Bush, the political moment was one of profound despair. Conservative pundits were crowing about a permanent majority. Democrats needed a Joan of Arc; instead they found themselves stuck between timid and triangulating party leaders and progressives captive to academic disquisition and factional purity. Against all that, Paul Hackett was an electrifying figure. A Marine just back from Iraq, he was an unapologetic, populist Democrat who was prone to saying things such as “Bush is a chicken hawk, okay? Tough shit.” He was, in other words, very much like the progressive bloggers then coming into their own. Like Hackett, these new pamphleteers had been shaped by a lifetime of watching the disciplined, ruthless Republican message machine. Like him, they were voluble, pissed off, and itching for a fight.

In the end, Hackett didn’t deliver the upset that the bloggers who converged on his campaign’setting up their laptops in local taverns and raising almost two-thirds of his $850,000 war chest-had hoped for. But he came close enough to signal the possibility of a new kind of politics, a merger of door-knocking and digital outreach. By 2006, the blogosphere and its organizing and fundraising cohorts (MoveOn, ActBlue, et al.) were forces to be reckoned with, supporting hundreds of feisty Democrats in supposedly impossible districts, and…well, you know the rest.

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