The Obama campaign is taking fire in Philadelphia because it's refusing to literally hand over bags of cash to local party bosses. Ward bosses are demanding "street money," loose cash they need to keep their loosely put together political machines moving. They aren't getting it because the Obama campaign believes they can, once again, circumvent an entrenched political hierarchy.

Obviosly, as Jay Newton-Small points out over at Swampland, part of this is optics. Promising a new politics and then handing out "street money" would be hypocritical, to say the least. But this also has to be put in the context of a sea change in how campaigns engage voters that started in the Dean campaign and is continuing in both the Obama and Clinton campaigns this cycle.

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Chris Hayes, stealing from his own publication, posts the text of a compelling editorial reflecting on yesterday's Petraeus/Crocker testimony:

Here’s the problem: after Bush and Cheney have left and even if the American people reject McCain’s plan to faithfully continue their policy, our politics will remain trapped. For empire comes with constraints, and it is within this cage of thought that our war “debate” continues to pace and growl. To “change course,” as the current vocabulary has it, requires more than a package of strategic adjustments. We must unlock empire’s cage and reject the entire project of occupation as something to be properly managed instead of ended as soon as possible.