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A must read from historian Ken Star. Worth quoting:

Something powerfully transformative is underway in state politics, and it is nothing less than voters' self-liberation from a claustrophobic and demeaning political culture out of sync with today's 24/7 information society and unworthy of the larger creativity of the Golden State.

And this:

The high-speed Internet- connected multimedia culture, thirdly, cannot be controlled at any one point. It is open, unfiltered and rabidly democratic. Now it helps spawn political candidacies .. Candidates open Web sites, not headquarters. The political debate is conducted in cyberspace, with blogs of virtually all political stripes and voters providing the dialogue — and it's instantly accessible. State politics, by contrast, is a largely closed system of noncompetitive seats, limited budgetary options and rules designed to impede action, with the development of leadership on a voter-imposed time clock. In short, politicians are playing on an increasingly smaller court at a pace that seems frozen by Internet standards.