Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute recently observed, "The 20th century was the cult of the artiste, the director, the president or the CEO, the mad genius who knows everything and controls everything. But the way our economy works now, it’s increasingly made up of all kinds of people contributing at all different levels. Why wouldn’t our politics work like that, too?"

Indeed, politics is migrating more and more to the web: netroots, bloggers shaping the national dialogue, voters using the internet to check a candidate’s voting record, etc. As an adviser for the 2004 campaign realized too late, "…the dangerous lesson of the web [is] you succeed by giving up control, and that’s the inverse of the normal campaign. The most difficult choice is just to wake up and smell the coffee."

Many are scared of the two-way conversation that blogging and podcasting facilitate. Trying to avoid the oncoming train will be scarier still.