Right now there really isn't around and functioning set of organizations capable of activating grassroots inputs and supports, channeling support or dissent, and in general articulating the values of large numbers of people.

Obama and the organization around him put together just such a massive and popular coalition (though drawing upon precedents such as the Dean campaign or other less party-based institutions). And it clearly was both a campaign of support for what appeared to be the case and was promised and a campaign of dissent against the status quo ante.

Glenn pointed out that on the right the greatest loyalty was to the movement and its ideology; I don't really think that there is any such counterpart on the liberal or left side for people to owe their allegiances to. The Democratic Party as an institution, in my view, had so ossified to its center-right / base-cutting strategy that it practically required the emergence of charismatic individuals to challenge its tendencies and orthodoxies, or at least certain of them.

Not that there have been such institutions before, not for a long, long, looooong while in U.S. organizational history.

But neither Obama nor the Democratic Party are going to put together campaigns to oppose their own prerogatives.

So I don't see so much the question as being that of people focusing on dissociating themselves from the charismatic leader, but the ever-present need to be able to do something else, to be able to fight for what you want as opposed to simply waiting to either see if Obama supports your goals or then having to complain or fight against him when he does not, or seems likely not to.

As soon as I saw the Dean-led DNC being absorbed into the presidential campaign and then the grassroots-friendly and supportive Dean leaving to be replaced by Kaine (decent enough politician, but no organizer of grassroots Democrats to push for their own preferred policies), I knew that the rare time in which the DNC was actually articulating coherent grassroots-supported liberal views was over. It's a natural process, and the DNC only served that way for a while based upon the grassroots-friendly charismatic leader it had for a while.

It's a period of structural dependency. We're not the only country who goes through this or will be going through it. Bolivia wouldn't have changed as much as it has without the charismatic leader Evo Morales drawing upon his grassroots base & history.

But places like Bolivia are more accustomed to grassroots-based organizations to articulate social aims and pressures. If Morales departs too much from his base of support, he not only faces being undermined by a truly vicious opposition, but a grassroots base more than willing to take to the streets or protest or sit-in, whatever. Not perfectly, I don't want to idealize them or anyone else -- it's just a different dynamic.

I'd like to be optimistic and think that people will begin to feel their way around this new environment and will respond to their (predictable but not justifiable) disappointments by figuring out how to reorganize or organize for their own agendas.

But structurally, yeah, right now there's really not much in between complete dependence upon Obama's own decisions, the power tendencies among the Democratic Party's establishment and most powerful leaders, and semi-organized dissent via various media and internet fora.

I think many liberal/left independents and grassroots Democrats and do want to actively support the policies they would prefer and actively work against policies they don't, but they don't want to deal with Obama as though he were the Republican opposition, and they don't really see what other alternatives there are.

At least when Republicans carry out some policy you oppose, there's a clear notion of how to change that -- you change them out for people you think may not support that same policy.

There certainly are some methods to work on changing the policies of people in 'your' generally preferred party whom you elected, but they're not that strong at the moment.

Maybe it's still not dry enough.

If Harry Reid had 99 Democratic Senators, he'd be complaining about how difficult it was to pass anything too strong in this complex environment. The problem in my view is that there's little evidence to counter the intuition that Harry Reid acts the way he does because it represents what he wants to do.

Once again, our elite liberal hawks have outlined the rules by which to analyze the Goodness and Badness of some state's actions:

What matters is who they are, not what they do.

So, 'shut up, it's stupid to criticize the U.S. for doing a particular thing that is exactly what I would criticize another country for doing, because we are not that other country'.

Likewise, sinfulness is a matter mainly of the commoners, because the King has been selected by God, and therefore his sinfulness is less sinful than ours.