Todd Beeton alerted us to this earlier, but the new Working for Us PAC just fundamentally upended the conventional wisdom about Ellen Tauscher and her 2008 primary campaign.

This is not “cocky bloggers” who are “getting too big for their pixels”. Steve Rosenthal, Anna Burger, Eli Pariser, Linda Lipsen, Kos — the list of those involved amounts to an impressive breadth and depth of a coalition. These “top Democrats” targeting is a clear sign they “share the bloggers’ hostility” towards Ellen Tauscher.

Join me after the flip where I’ll take a look at how this has changed the money race, candidate recruitment, field, and communication.

The Money Race  It is now likely that Ellen Tauscher will be the financial underdog in her primary campaign. Since bloggers started targeting her, it has become apparent to everyone that she has lost her ability to cut deals across the aisle, which dries up her corporate PAC support. In fact, considering Tauscher’s long-standing feud with Nancy Pelosi, the smart business PACs will contribute to her opponent and kiss up to the Speaker. And Tauscher’s New Dems didn’t raise much last year even with PAC support.

In 1996, Tauscher spend $1.7 million to buy her seat, but she lost that ability following her divorce. In short, Tauscher has lost access to the two main sources of support that have been there for her in the past.

But her opponent will be able to raise huge money online with DailyKos and Moveon and receive a great many checks from the trial lawyers. We’re talking millions.

Even more important is that there will be more than enough easy money to free the challenger from the phone to go out and campaign while Tauscher is begging for donations.

Candidate Recruitment  What potential candidates want to hear are things like, “courageous primary challengers will have immediate, substantive, significant support.” Removing viability concerns means that we no longer need to find a self-funding candidate, we are free to find the best candidate. And with the emerging time-frame, there is no rush.

Primary campaigns are like recalls, the first question is whether the incumbent should be retired followed by a traditional comparison race.

It makes sense for a challenger to announce early in the quarter to be able to report good fundraising numbers out of the gate. Nobody wants to announce in the summer. That leaves early April or early October. The former turns this into a marathon and we can do better in a sprint. To make a long story short, the smart move isn’t until at least the first week in October (setting up a sprint 2 months longer than Lamont).

Until then, it will only be about Tauscher. Not about her compared to somebody else, but about what she is doing.

And now, there is a perfect vehicle to advance the debate on the first question. Working for Us probably has 9 months to keep the focus squarely on Tauscher while organizing the district and raising an army.

Field  One huge potential for a challenger is the ability to leverage the entire Bay Area and deploy activists via the 6 different BART stations stretched across Tauscher’s district.

With Moveon and Kos working in tandem to electronically mobilize their tens of thousands Bay Area supporters the online potential for offline volunteering is enormous and scalable. The unions have impressive infrastructure in place and taken together there is an army waiting for walk kits and phone lists.

Communication  Frank Russo has a great read on the democratizing of ideas that this race is triggering. Tauscher’s opponent is going to have real-time message capability across the blogosphere.

Voice in traditional media are going to be held to account — publicly. This is now the number one primary race in the country and online fact checking is going to keep the discussion in the reality-based world.

And newspapers aren’t just going to follow this in print, they are going to do it online. Already, this story has been blogged on by Lisa Vorderbrueggen, Robert Salladay and Josh Richman

As a proxie battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, this race is going to be exciting and the coverage will be expansive and in-depth. Political junkies should be delighted. As should Democrats in California’s 10th congressional district because you are going to have a choice.

If you are into campaigns and elections, Ellen Tauscher is certainly one to watch.

Lisa Vorderbrueggen has an article in today’s Contra Costa Times, titled, Bloggers take Tauscher to task. The article has a number of huge problems, let me list some of mine and I’m sure others will chime in with their complaints.

First off, I don’t see how this story could be written without mentioning that the exact same thing happened to Congressman Jeffery Cohelan in the next district over. OK, maybe not the exact same thing because Cohelan went into his unsuccessful 1970 primary with strong labor support. But the complete lack of historical perspective does damage to the analysis.

But not as much damage as this:

Yes, Tauscher voted to allow President Bush to start the Iraq war. But so did every other Democrat in the nation except one.

That is a lie. A lie in the pages of the Contra Costa Times. In reality, Tauscher was one of only two Bay Area Democrats to support the unnecessary, unilateral, invasion of Iraq with the vast majority opposed. In all, only 81 Democrats voted the wrong way on the biggest issue of our time with 126 voting no, meaning 60% of house Democrats were opposed.

This failure to understand even the most basic dynamics and history means this isn’t the type of article I would recommend people reading.

Yes, she nominated Lieberman for vice president at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. But that was before the Iraq war, and many Democrats supported his candidacy.

Of course, Vorderbrueggen fails to mention Tauscher’s continuing support for Lieberman after the start of the war. It would have made sense to point out that Tauscher was of his few and biggest supporters during his flop of a 2004 Presidential campaign.

Yes, she voted with Republicans for the bankruptcy bill and has supported global trade deals that progressives deplore. But Tauscher’s record on key Democratic priorities — environment, abortion rights, gun control, unions, same-sex marriage — is identical to those of her more liberal neighbors, Rep. George Miller of Martinez and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.

Tauscher votes with corporations against people on the major economic issues and Vorderbrueggen thinks that her record on unions is the same as Miller and Pelosi? Uh, no. But more importantly this district was designed for a Democrat who is strong on both economic and social issues and there is no reason for the voters to keep getting (literally) short-changed on economic issues.

And despite past clashes with party leaders over ideology and district boundaries, there’s no sign that top Democrats share the bloggers’ hostility.

I’m going to call bullshit. In fact, during Tauscher’s battle with John Burton I believe the exact phrase he told Roll Call about Tauscher was, “full of s-.” OK, maybe that wasn’t the exact phrase, but that is how it was printed. Tauscher hurts the Democratic Party and “top Democrats” realize this, but there is a lot of personal history. Notice the absense of support from “top Democrats” like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer. It was Barbara Boxer who once said of Tauscher shivving Pelosi, “Her doing this says to me she is a very bitter person.” These weren’t just battles about “ideology and district boundaries” but were instead intense personal battles.

The bloggers say Tauscher tried to mask her moderate roots when her staff scrubbed a couple of Lieberman photos from her Web site. (Two photos remain, however, and her staff said this was a routine site update.)

The only routine thing involved was Tauscher’s staff telling Vorderbrueggen something and her believing it instead of investigating.

But ignore the netroots and grass roots at your peril, Leach warns. These are the same folks who helped funnel the Bay Area progressive army into the campaign of McNerney, the underdog who defeated seven-term incumbent Richard Pombo in November.

This might have been a nice point in the story for Vorderbrueggen to point out that McNerney first stomped Tauscher’s candidate in the primary despite a huge financial disadvantage.

So, does Tauscher have a problem, or have cocky bloggers overstated their powers as kingmaker, or in this case, queenmaker?

No one knows.

Actually, lots of people know. But they wouldn’t know it from reading the Contra Costa Times.