Muscle

The blogosphere has it:

Over the course of a week, liberal blogs were asking for donations to Darcy Burner's campaign for Congress in Washington. Seems Bush is coming out to support her opponent and bloggers wanted to counter any fundraising he supported with a campaign of their own. In short, the blogosphere easily raised $100K.

Atrios:

I was looking over the size of donations to Burner, and amazingly there were only a couple of whale sized donations. That was a stunning amount of money raised given that fact. I think the average donation was about 40 bucks in the list I saw.

It's this kind of muscle that will get politicians attention.