> This focuses on the antiwar movement. Once it stopped being Bush's war, and became Obama's - poof, no more antiwar movement.
I tend to agree with this, but I wonder if it doesn't give the Dems more power than they actually have, and it certainly gives them more than they should have. The "poof" seems to me to indicate bad empiricism as much as definitive proof. The antiwar movement was certainly in tatters well before Obama, and reducing its demise to Obama skips lots of other conjunctural facts.
That's not to say the left has no relation to the DP. Of course it does, but I think Carrol's concern with "the way in which the DP bleeds movements not only of 'mass followers' but of organizers and leadership" does more to reinscribe the relationship than it does to interrupt it, specifically by declaring the DP's omnipotence.
Carrol is fond of talking about Wisconsin and how it has opened new possibilities, which I agree with. But part of what made Wisconsin "Wisconsin" was the role that Democratic legislators played in the events, particularly their fleeing the state and disrupting the legislative process, which helped create the space that allowed the protest movement to flourish, to become creative. I don't think it's declaring, either descriptively or normatively, the left's dependency on the DP to acknowledge that that's what went on *in this instance*. Of course the Dems had their own, ultimately nefarious reasons for doing it, and it's certainly worth discussing whether the Dems need the protesters or vice versa (though it's both), but Wisconsin shows that, whether Carrol likes it or not, there is, structurally, a relationship between the left and the DP, and that it doesn't have to be one that sucks the former dry (though I agree with Carrol and Doug that it almost always does).