So I’m reading this article in Time Magazine by Amy Sullivan, with the title

Races to Watch: Will the Netroots Sink a Microsoft Dem?

And I’m thinking, wow, has blogger support really been a problem for Darcy Burner?  With a headline like that, surely someone must’ve done some polling.  Or netroots support must be being used as a campaign issue in commercials.  Because nobody would use a headline like that without some real evidence.  So I’m skimming down the page…nothing, nothing…and then I come upon the final paragraph:

"Darcy Burner is pretty open about the fact that she wants to go to Congress to represent the netroots," Reichert’s campaign manager Mike Shields, told the Seattle Times. "That is her constituency, and that is who she raised money from, and so that’s who she’ll do the bidding of." But Democrats worry about the association as well. "The big question people are quietly asking about her," says one local Democratic consultant, "is, in building her movement, did she lose touch with the people she sought to serve?"

Really?  That’s it?  The Reichert campaign levels a shopworn critique that every campaign running against a netroots favorite tries to use, despite the fact that it’s never once had any measurable impact, and some Democrat goes "uh-huh," and suddenly we’re tanking her?   No mention that the GOP has dumped money into the district, or that George Bush himself came and headlined a fundraiser.  It’s the bloggers.

Amy Sullivan has been a target of blogger ire in the past, largely due to her propensity for assuming that her personal positions are far more reflective of those of the general populace than any empirical evidence would indicate. 

And blogger critiques are frequently leveled by journalists who have had bad run-ins with the netroots in the past, and want to generalize their own experience way past anything that they merit. 

With such scant evidence for her claims, one is tempted to suggest that Amy is projecting once again.

Update:  I put in a call to Stoller who is up in Washington working on the campaign to ask him what this is all about.  He says that Sullivan put in calls to "Democratic consultants" in the area, pissed that Darcy didn’t come up through their machine and had outside sources of funding and so wasn’t dependent on them.  Since the complaints of a few people matched her own personal experience, it became a problem throughout the district that could tank Burner’s campaign — without the slightest shred of empirical evidence. 

It’s "coalition of the embittered" time once again.