Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.

Here's the money quote :

For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People” to vote so the “politics as usual” could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual” is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.

Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.

[Ed. Note: Welcome, Councilman]

In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, "sick and tired of being sick and tired", led a fight at the Democratic National Convention that shook up the nation. Her fight was to seat black delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 2008, our fight may be to stop the DNC from using superdelegates to deny Senator Barack Obama from becoming the democratic nominee for President.

Senator Barack Obama is shaking up the political establishment and causing Democratic Party leadership to scurry, scheme, and prepare to take the nomination away from him with their superdelegates.

At the beginning of the Democratic National Committee Primary/Caucus process, the leadership of the party was preparing for (so they thought) the inevitable victory of Senator Hillary Clinton. As a matter of fact they were preparing to coronate her after the results came in from the February 5th Super Tuesday Primary/Caucus vote. Barack rocked their world! Who would have thought that as of this writing Senator Barack Obama would be winning the majority of the states, the majority of the elected delegates, and the majority of the popular vote. He is now the leading candidate!

The only count that Senator Clinton leads Senator Obama in is the super delegates. There are a total of 4,049 delegates. There are two kinds of delegates: pledged delegates and superdelegates. Pledged delegates represent the preferences of the voters and are awarded through the primary/caucus voting process. Superdelegates are selected by the party. Of the 4,049 delegates, 3,253 are pledged and 796 are super.