Can you hear that giant sucking sound? That's the sound of your hopes and dreams going south.

List the issues where the Left has engaged and you'll arrive at about the number of issues where the Left has been powerless to achieve its goals: FISA. Torture accountability. Guantanamo detainees. Wall Street malpractice. Health care. Cap and trade. Afghanistan.

And that's just the short list of issues that Progressives (using this term interchangeably with "the Left") have failed to influence to any practical degree. It's enough to make us weep, bang our fists on tabletops and rant about outlandish fortune (or Obama's milquetoast treachery) in blog post after blog post. But we're overlooking the real culprits, and no, it's not the military-industrial-fundamentalist-CIA-GOP complex, either.

Why, oh why, are we losing fight after fight when it was our own mighty efforts that elected the nation's first black president and stemmed the tide of the Bush/Cheney era? Why aren't our voices being taken seriously? Why are we suddenly so impotent in securing the change we once believed in?

Why?

Three words. Incompetent grassroots leaders.

I've seen it time and time again, up close and personal, in a myriad of groups, ever since Obama's inauguration. The People Power unleashed last year has gone flaccid. It's lost that lovin' feeling.

There was the bus trip to Washington I took in July as part of the H-CAN rally. Gamaliel--the same organization that once trained Obama in community organizing-- had chartered the bus from Chicago to carry some participants. It arrived three hours late at our rendezvous point in Indianapolis because of problems with the air conditioning system, which broke down before the bus even left Chicago.

And then it broke down three more times in Washington and on the return trip.

With windows that would not open except if jettisoned completely in an emergency, the bus lumbered along with only brief periods of functional air conditioning. For hours at a time, its 59 passengers suffered and perspired like fountains, with one asthmatic woman laboring to breathe and one young man literally passing out from the oven-like heat on board our mobile summer sardine can. An elderly gentleman was so disoriented that he walked into the side of the bus during a rest stop and split his head open.

The cohort of Chicago clergy leading our group did nothing to stop the calamity. Not until two people left the bus to rent a car back home did they contact Gamaliel's home office to request the dispatch of a new bus. Instead, despite heated exchanges with disgruntled passengers, they forced everyone to risk--and in some cases, surrender--their health in the cause of ... wait for it ... health care reform.

"We has met the enemy and he is us," Pogo said. Or as Shakespeare put it centuries before: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings."

Here at TPMCafe, several bloggers (myself included) were drafted to go to Washington for a rally in August. Bloggers and readers (just like you!) ponied up over $1,200 to send me and another blogger to represent support for Single-Payer. We did that. Me and the other 300 or so people who attended the event. Yep, just 300 from all across the country. (Congressional-sized yawn.)

I don't fault our earnest TPM organizers, but the rally's sponsoring organization, HealthCare NOW!. Its leaders should have canceled the event, knowing that they expected less than 1,000 people to turn out (as I discovered the day before I left).

Today, I attended a meeting of a dozen zealots who are all energy and no discernible purpose. Tomorrow, they will stage a sit-in at the Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield headquarters with the intention of netting a few civil disobedience arrests for trespassing.

When I asked a few questions about their messaging and what their desired effect on health care reform was, they became aggressive and dismissive. "That's not important. We need to get back to the plan," I was told, as they busied themselves around a large drawing pad like Hogan's heroes.

They will be lucky to make 30 seconds on the local news, let alone any impact on health care legislation pending before Congress. In the end, I declined to attend.

But these are only small groups, you might say. Surely, larger groups like Organizing for America are led by competent leaders.

You might be right in your neck of the woods, but I doubt it. I spent two months trying to get an unpaid internship at Organizing for America. I received an email a couple weeks after I filled out the online application. It said that all local internship positions had been filled.

I pressed for an explanation with the local field director, who had encouraged me to apply. She finally got back to me three phone calls and a month later. I was scheduled in last week to meet her and discuss the internship. Oh, and could I do a little phone-banking until she arrived? Certainly, I said.

She never showed.

"I'll be there tomorrow night," she told me later. "For sure." I came in again the next night, just as she was leaving the office almost an hour early.

"If I'm going to drive 10 miles to come in, the trip and my gas costs should be worth it," I told her, "especially since I'm on SSI and it took me three days just to round up $9 to put in my tank."

"You can always call from home," she said. "I'll email you the link and a password" for OFA's online phone list. Two days later, with no email and no answer, I left a pointed resignation on her voice mail.

And then there's ACORN, and ... well, you get the idea.

Progressives are poorly led and poorly served by our grassroots leaders. The caliber of people recruited and put in charge of things just ain't what it used to be during the presidential campaign.

We are led by the flakes and the well-intentioned. Impassioned zealots rather than careful achievers. The rudely neglectful rather than the conscientiously respectful. Those who burn through volunteers like engine oil in an '87 Ford Escort.

No wonder the Left is impotent to effect its desired change. If our grassroots leadership reflects our best and brightest, then we truly have met ourselves in Pogo's epiphany of blame.