Politically I think Senator Russ Feingold is one of the Good Guys. So, to be perfectly bipartisan about it, is Senator John McCain. (You know what McCain looks like, so here's Feingold.)

This is especally true regarding campaign finance. Proponents of reform have been pushing uphill with scant success ever since the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Vallejo, which basically said money is speech, and those with more money can out-shout the rest of us.

McCain and Feingold tried to fit that decision inside their eponymous campaign finance act, and while on most counts the Supreme Court ruled they did, that act also covered the Internet, and both men have insisted to this day that's true.

Now that the blogosphere has pushed-back on this, pushed back hard, from both sides of the aisle, the good guys have not been heard from.

Their mistake is assuming that on the Internet speech and money are the same thing. They are not. If you've got the goods you will get the traffic, and if you then open up your yap about public policy you're still spending no more time and effort on that than any other blogger.

I've been covering the intersection of the Internet and politics since 1995, off-and-on. One big reason George W. Bush is President today was that he managed to intimidate Internet campaigns of 2000 with threats of lawsuits, claiming (through lawyer Ben Ginsburg) that even Webrings represented material campaign contributions that should, and would, be counted against the law's caps.

As a result, candidates like Bill Bradley severed their own netroots and were never heard from again. Not everyone was intimidated. Zack Exley, who had bought gwbush.org as a joke, responded with brutal satire. He got a career out of it.

Right now, in fact, the lack of clarity concerning the use of campaign money on Internet resources is creating a world in which our political clubhouses are completely independent entities. Sites like Redstate and DailyKos have scaled, community networking software, while the parties and even PAC groups like Democracy for America do not.

What the FEC has been considering is clamping down on RedState, Kos, and even independent bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Duncan Black. Media companies like FoxNews, the Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal -- which are often just as political -- would be exempt.

The word for this is Clueless.

Now I would like to end this by telling you what I think ought to be done. But the good guys have been cowed. They've gone quiet.

Personally I think we need to separate the idea of spending and the idea of value. You can get an enormous amount of political value on the Internet without spending a dime, if you're clever, and politicians of all stripes (or at least their advisors) are very, very clever. But the converse is not necessarily true. Spending 10X money on the Internet doesn't give you 10X the voice, as it does in other media.

We need to get our arms around that truth before we can start to move forward. But the good guys are silent, mum, mute. Get as close to their pieholes as you can, you will still hear nothing on this.

End the silence.