[This is my comment to Matt verbatim.  The first paragraphs repeat a bit of what I said above.]

If folks in DC see our money and want to know what we care about, and that's why you're thinking of going GlobalWarming, then I would suggest something even less sexy.

If they want to know what we/theNetroots want, I think we want process reforms.  I think the main thing we feel is that the political system is not responsive to us, that some corrupt corporate Rs have gone absolutely nuts with our country, and the Dems aren't succeeding at fighting back, and they seem more scared of their own base (us) than anything else anyway, and all that combined means  the system has completely shut us out.  THAT'S what Dean's "take our country back" theme was all about: that feeling that the political system 1) doesn't include us, 2) doesn't work, and, incidentally, 3) is in the hands of crazy people.   Global Warming is the kind of hard problem that you solve once you have a sensible, realistic, responsible, modern liberal government.  It's one of the reasons you need a real government.  But the main thing we need right now is not a solution to Global Warming; it's a functioning political system that can handle and work out a large number of individual problems like this.  I believe this very strongly.

Now it's one thing to feel shut out of a failing government, and another to conclude that process reform is the solution.  Maybe just winning somehow is the solution.  Still, given the strong centrist component of the Democratic caucus, and the strong extremist component of the R caucus, simply getting to 53% of the legislature will not put us in a position to really solve problems.  There's a huge structural problem with American government that two election cycles and 53 D Senators will not solve.  Specifically, the problem with our government is that some conservative nuts have managed to game the system so that really crazy guys like Cheney and Limbaugh and Santorum and Alito are in positions of real power, and can frequently win majorities in elections.  They've done that by playing the earmark game and the military-industrial-congressional complex like a flute, and by securing the absolute fealty of business on one hand and religious and toughguy voters on the other.  If we're gonna try to really break their hold on the government, and get a sensible, responsible, modern, liberal government back that can handle problems like global warming, we need to rewrite the rules by which politics and elections get played.  That is how we empower our people and break their machine all at once.  Structural, political-process-rules stuff.

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I don't really know which specific reforms to propose; there are folks in DC and elsewhere who would.  (CREW?  PIRGs?)  But some general notions:

-- public financing of campaigns (in some sensible, incremental way)
-- lobbying and income and consulting rules for officials (how many congressional spouses are getting money from companies the congressperson oversees???)
-- overhauling earmarks and procurement and (no-bid) contracting out of the executive branch
-- a holiday on election day
-- a ban on individual stock holdings by officials (large mutual funds only, no playing with companies you regulate or earmark)

... eh, I'm not informed enough to go into specifics.  The problem though is that the political system does not work.  The money-earmark-fundraise-redistrict-voter suppress-cowthemedia-ownthemedia angle has been played so well by radical Rs that they have gotten some really inappropriate people installed as national leaders.  The solution is to break all the links that allow men like Duncan Hunter and Porter Goss and Peter Hoekstra and Representative Dick Cheney to entrench and become powerful.  Put more broadly, the solution is to make sure that elected leaders are really deriving their power from responsiveness to all their constituents and their legitimate needs, rather than by playing this financing game and then pulling a fast one on their carefully districted and suppressed voters.  If that's the purpose, then public financing and earmark reform are the same thing.  A national voter holiday and motor voter registration and non-corrupt districting and stopping media (and newspaper!) consolidation are the same thing.  It's about making sure our government really answers to us, instead of allowing a strategically brilliant cabal to exploit the openings in our political system as currently constructed.  

What I'm saying is that our problem is a system that had some inherent weaknesses that were eventually exploited, in this case by William Buckley's heirs.  Now Cheney is in control and Dems are so scared of Russert and his mean Belafonte questions that they dont even want to think about us out here on the ground.  "Global Warming loses elections.  Remember when they called Gore Ozone man???"  The solution to the big problem is to break the machine they have and fix the system that allowed it, by making every effort to make politics actually respond to real people.  If a campaign finance measure in which a $25 donation earns $125 of public financing while a $1000 donation earns zero matching funds will do that, then whatever.  But this system in which Duncan Hunter's real constituent is Bechtel, and his voters are just a well-manipulated afterthought, has got to be changed.