Ari Melber | The Nation

Barney Frank with senators Nancy Pelosi, right, and Steny Hoyer, left, in 2008. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta.)

Governor Deval Patrick is deciding who will be the next senator from Massachusetts, assuming that John Kerry is confirmed as secretary of state. No one else has any official say in the decision, but many liberal activists are betting they can push Patrick online.

Over 32,000 people have now backed a petition urging Patrick to nominate Barney Frank, the recently retired liberal firebrand, as a temporary replacement. The effort is organized by the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which also made a large early push for Elizabeth Warren, recruiting about 339,000 small donors for the professor-turned-pol.

The election may be over, but the Obama campaign’s e-mails are still coming.

On Monday, Obama campaign aide Stephanie Cutter e-mailed supporters asking for help in pressuring Congress to back the president’s tax plan. And in contrast to many past forays into Obama’s e-mail advocacy—which focused on broadly “building support” or thanking Democratic politicians who were already on board—the new effort aims squarely at the GOP.

Republicans are holding “middle-class tax cuts hostage,” writes Cutter, “because they want to cut taxes for millionaires.” (That may sound like political rhetoric, but it’s literally the House GOP’s current stance.) So the campaign is pitching a new online calling tool, which enables people to call their Republican representatives or, if you live in a blue area, to call fellow Obama supporters in redder pastures and urge them to get on the phone.

President Obama’s re-election marks the most decisive mandate for an assertive, progressive governing model in well over a generation.

It is worth beginning with a memory. Barack Obama was first elected after a period of profound failure by elite and government institutions, from finance to foreign policy to Hurricane Katrina, and his first term immediately and unapologetically enacted a flurry of government solutions.

The new president used federal power to take populist action in a range of markets—health insurance, cars, banking and small business. In each case, Republicans responded with the same argument: government was too big, expensive and incompetent for these tasks.

While the political world is fixated on the presidential campaign, an important fight has been brewing between progressive activists and online organizers. Those two groups are not mutually exclusive, of course, so this debate upends some traditional ideological boundaries.

It started last week, when The Huffington Post reported on change at Change.org. Now, you don’t need to know the name Change.org, as a website, in order to care about this fight. In fact, when Change.org succeeds, you should hardly hear about it all.

That’s because Change.org is about other people. It provides a platform to empower citizens with free organizing and petition drives, using the hook of viral campaigns to amplify the voices of unknown activists. The model can work really well. If you follow progressive politics, you probably know about some of the people who have used the site for unlikely breakthroughs.