Remember when it was thought the right had talk radio and the left had the Internet. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat thinks the right has caught up and credits netroots — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — with driving an insurgent Republican’s campaign in Massachusetts.
The empowerment of grassroots success can be a setup for disappointment, though, as the Obama idealists have well learned.
If liberals are feeling disillusioned, though, their right-wing imitators may be ripe for an even greater letdown. The Obama administration has at least gone some distance toward enacting an agenda that the net-roots left supports. The “right roots” activists are rallying around politicians who are promising to shrink government without offering any plausible sketch of how to do it. When Scott Brown pledges an across-the-board tax cut and sweeping deficit reduction all at once, he’s setting the conservative grass roots up for a major disappointment.