One of the topics I discussed with Diane Rehm yesterday on her nationwide NPR show was the FISA fight, which Nathan Newman just referenced. I suggested that the effort by Netroots activists to use Obama's own website as a tool to pressure Obama to back off his endorsement of a right-wing FISA proposal is valiant, worthwhile and a smart way to use the Establishment's rules against the Establishment (to paraphrase the great uprising organizer Saul Alinsky). In this case, uprising activists used the latitude granted by a presidential nominee's website to pressure that presidential nominee to do the opposite of what that presidential nominee is doing - and this offers some hope for today's uprising.

Then again, Obama threw the progressive movement under the bus, voting for warrantless wiretapping and for immunity for telecom companies.

He did this not because believes in the substantive arguments - in fact, we have no idea what he believes in on this issue considering he promised "unequivocally" not to vote this way just a few months ago. No, he did this because he decided that it was politically safer for him to cast the anti-progressive vote for the status quo, rather than the progressive vote for change. And ultimately, that's a commentary on our weakness.

As OpenLeft's Matt Stoller has written, Obama has quickly taken control of the Democratic Party apparatus - which is what he should be able to do as the titular head of the party now. However, what Obama has also done is taken over key pieces of outside progressive infrastructure and ignored other pieces. Moveon.org, for instance, spends much of its time echoing Obama's message and attacking John McCain rather than using the election as an instrument of leverage to exert pressure on both Obama and McCain on major issues. In other words, Obama has effectively taken over Moveon - or at least its strategic focus. As evidenced by his FISA vote, Obama is also ignoring the Netroots.

This is not what Obama should be able to do - and his ability to do so should be a wake-up call that we still only really have a weak progressive uprising, and not a full-fledged progressive movement. A full-fledged progressive movement would have institutions that could not be categorically taken over or ignored by a presidential candidate of either party. Those institutions would be truly independent, issue-first, party-second institutions with enough grassroots strength to demand attention. Instead,

Of course, we have some of these institutions at the state and local level. For instance, New York's Working Families Party is issue-first, Democratic Party-second with a huge grassroots base that makes it fairly impervious to being fully co-opted or ignored by Democratic Party candidates, whether in the Empire State or nationally. The labor movement is another such institution.

But a lot of the much-vaunted new progressive infrastructure is so partisan focused that a presidential candidate who has been on the national stage for less than four years is able to take it over in a matter of months. That, of course, threatens to relegate this new infrastructure to total obsolescence if Obama wins the White House (if the only organizing issue of this infrastructure is winning the White House, then by definition, the infrastructure ceases to be important once the White House is won). Worse, there isn't - and won't be - as strong a pressure system as we need if we are going to get real change.

So why did I start by saying the FISA fight - and the use of MyBO to wage that fight - offers hope? Because it signals a recognition that what we've done in the past to organize for power hasn't been enough. It tells us that we are getting comfortable with a more confrontational approach toward both Republicans AND Democrats if we expect to wield power - and not just whine about being rolled. In short, we are starting to realize that to take this uprising moment and turn it into a functional progressive movement, we have to adopt a movement psychology, rather than a partisan one.