By far the most interesting article in Sunday's Times was this piece by Matt Bai. In it, he explains how Democratic brains got around the campaign finance laws, which put restrictions on individual donations to the parties, by setting up new organizations that weren't technically parties, but could collect unlimited amounts of money from donors. The whole thing ended up collapsing, but Bai believes that this development is another sign that the party system is dissolving in America. Read the whole thing.
His final paragraph was lovely:
In this way, ACT helped to usher us into the post-party world. We are now confronting a period in which the power and the innovation in American politics will reside not in some party headquarters on Capitol Hill but in a decentralized network of grass-roots groups, donors and Internet impresarios, all of whom seem to be increasingly entwined with one another. There's peril in this trend -- it would seem to favor millionaires over workers, and ideologues over pragmatists -- but it was probably inevitable. Everywhere else in American life, after all, we see evidence of what the Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, in his 2000 book, ''The Next Deal,'' presciently identified as ''the Choice Generation.'' We surf hundreds of cable channels and endless Web sites, assemble customized computers with the click of a mouse and choose from every imaginable permutation of mortgage and credit card. Was it really reasonable, then, to expect the same top-down system that has governed American politics since the time of Martin Van Buren to somehow survive the revolution intact? In the end, ACT's contribution was to act as a bridge from the last political moment to the next, hastening the chaotic process of democratization -- even without the capital ''D'' that its founders would have preferred.
I think I should like to be an Internet impresario.