Over a year ago, there was quite a blog dust-up here at MyDD about the 2008 Senate race in Oregon.

At the time, Matt Stoller hammered Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) for his "insider-itis" and worried that Wyden wouldn't "try to get progressive Senators elected to replace conservative ones".

I retorted, Matt responded, Wyden chief-of-staff Josh Kardon weighed in.

The key question, back in April 2007: Would Senator Ron Wyden campaign for Oregon's 2008 Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate?

And now we have our answer, in just four short minutes of video:

[Full disclosure: My consulting firm manages the websites for both Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley.  I speak only for myself.]

For weeks now, there's been all this talk about how this presidential primary campaign might come to an end - if several prominent superdelegates were to endorse either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as a group.  Or even, a larger group of semi-prominent superdelegates (remember the superdelegate surge that was rumored to be happening post-Texas/Ohio?)

Which got me to thinking:  Who would those superdelegates be?   Which superdelegates are especially influential - with other superdelegates, with the media, with the public?

• Obviously, a lot of folks have mentioned Al Gore.  But he doesn't seem particularly interested in the job.
• Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could play that role, but they seem committed to waiting it out.
• Jimmy Carter has negotiated peace treaties and observed elections all over the world.  Maybe we need him to weigh in.

In any case, rather than brainstorm up names, I decided to attempt a Power Ranking of Uncommitted Superdelegates.

So, I poured myself a stiff cocktail, came up with some criteria, assigned some values, and came up with a chart that ranks all 286 uncommitted superdelegates.

Thanks to Matt Stoller for bringing attention to the 2008 campaign to defeat Gordon Smith in Oregon.  Over at BlueOregon, I've probably written more about Gordon Smith and the reasons he needs to be ejected than anybody else in the lefty blogsphere.

But Matt misses some important details about Senator Ron Wyden.

Before I go further, a little disclosure is in order:  I was an intern for then-Congressman Wyden in '93 and a volunteer on the '96 campaign that defeated Gordon Smith.  Today, I'm managing Senator Wyden's campaign-funded policy website, Stand Tall for America.  That said, my comments here are my own.  I don't speak for the Senator or his staff.

Quoted in Oregon's most conservative newspaper, the Senator's chief-of-staff  - Josh Kardon - said "he won't campaign against Gordon" and Matt Stoller thought he heard something like "he won't help the Democratic candidate in 2008."

I am absolutely, positively 100% certain that Senator Ron Wyden will do everything he can to help Oregon's Democratic candidate defeat Gordon Smith.

Here's the deal...

Bumped from the diaries and slightly reformatted -- Jonathan... I asked Kari Chisholm to cross-post this piece from BlueOregon because I think it really gets to the heart of what we should be doing.

How do you build a movement?  

It's an interesting question - and one that's particularly compelling right now, as the Draft DeFazio movement gets underway in Oregon. [The blog Loaded Orygun is leading an effort to get Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio to challenge Oregon's Republican Senator Gordon Smith this cycle by raising funds for his campaign using ActBlue to the tune of close to $3K so far from close to 150 donors -- J.]

After all, in our modern world, everyone is busy.  Each and everyone one of us has too many things to do, and not enough time to do it.  The competing priorities of work, home, family, school, and whatever commitments we've each made to our communities.  It can be hard to squeeze just one more thing in -- even if that one thing takes only five minutes.

It's easy to think, "I'll let somebody else handle that.  I'm too busy."  It's easy to think that your own personal, individual involvement in something doesn't make a difference.  

Take voting, for example.  If you don't vote, will it really affect the outcome of elections you care about?  Probably not.  It's rare that one vote actually makes the difference.  But together, each of our individual votes do matter.

I call this The Applause Effect:  Sure, in a large and crowded venue, if you stop clapping, no one will notice. But if everyone thought that way, the silence would be profound.

Each individual person clapping on their own is what creates applause from a crowd.  And it's the same in politics.

In politics, it's easy to agree with an idea - and then fail to do anything about it.  "I'm too busy" and "Somebody else will do it" and "What difference can I make?" are all easy and lazy ways out.

[Continued...]

Someday, we'll look back on 2004, 2005, and 2006 as the time when progressives built the infrastructure - both online and off - to take back America.  

From ActBlue, to Gatheroo, to the Progressive Legislative Action Network, to the BlogAds Advertising Liberally network, to the New Politics Institute, to great national blogs like MyDD, Kos, Swing State, and countless others, we're all putting together the building blocks of the next great progressive movement.

This week, we're launching another one:  LeftyBlogs.com.  Every 10 minutes, LeftyBlogs scans over 600 local progressive blogs and looks for new stuff.  Then, on the website, it indexes it all - state by state.

In short, it's a very easy and very fast way for you to find out what's happening in the progressive blogosphere all across America.  Want the latest on the Ohio pay-to-play scandal?  Go to the Ohio page.  Want the latest on the Maryland governor's race?  Go to the Maryland page.  You get the idea.

Come on over and check it out: LeftyBlogs.com.  You'll be amazed at how rapidly you can get up to speed on what's going on in a particular state.  With LeftyBlogs, we're hoping to grow the progressive blogosphere at the local level - by helping blogs find their audience, and helping the audience find them.

And if you have a blog that's focused on local progressive stuff, be sure to add it to the index.  We're growing fast, and we want you in the mix.

Enjoy!

Kari Chisholm, Mandate Media

[Cross-posted over at my personal blog, Politics & Technology.]