This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.

As we've known for a while, they're struggling.

I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:

• Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
• Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
  

Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.