Clear eyed analysis from Josh Marshall

This whole post is worth reading. Here's the last paragraph:

In any case, the Dems got 48% last month. Whatever else you can say about that number, it suggests we don't have the luxury of having enough of us that we can start purging anyone. There are serious issues that divide us -- and they'll be argued over. But I don't believe that any of them are deep enough to prevent both sides from coexisting within the same party, especially considering what we are up against.

I'm afraid the left's hate of the middle is irreversible, mainly because it's based on conspiracy theories that people aren't able to let go of (the biggest one being the theory that Michael Moore isn't an idiot).

Maybe I've been too harsh on liberals lately, but that's because lately they've been operating in a fantasyland where the moderates (people like me) are the cause of all of their problems. We're cowardly spineless wimps who've been bought off by corporations. We're wrong about everything, and we want to compromise way too much with the Republicans.

To this, I say: grow up you idiots. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows my feelings about George W. Bush (the worst President our nation has ever seen) and Republicans (they've been adopting Nazi tactics lately).

The American Prospect takes aim at the DLC

Where, for instance, does a Democrat get off using a progressive message to become governor of Montana? How does an economic populist Democrat keep winning a congressional seat in what is arguably America's most Republican district? Why do culturally conservative rural Wisconsin voters keep sending a Vietnam-era anti-war Democrat back to Congress? What does a self-described socialist do to win support from conservative working-class voters in northern New England?

1. Wisconsin has rural voters. But they also have Madison.

2. Culturally conservative Vermont??? Vermont is conservative? Is this guy seeing things, because he might need to get his head checked out. Is this what passes for an argument on the left these days?

3. The Montana governor's race was won on environmental issues and guns. Is the NRA a progressive group? I think not. Try telling the "progressive" Million Mom March to forget about gun control.

The answers to these and other questions are the Democrats' very own Da Vinci Code -- a road map to political divinity. It is the path Karl Rove fears. He knows his GOP is vulnerable to Democrats who finally follow leaders who have translated a populist economic agenda into powerful cultural and values messages. It also threatens groups like the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which has pushed the Democratic Party to give up on its working-class roots and embrace big business' agenda.

It's always a conspiracy involving corporations. They're the boogie man! They're after all of us, and not even the simple country folk of red Vermont are safe!

These New Democrats, backed by huge corporate contributions, say that the party must reduce corporate regulation and embrace a free-trade policy that is wiping out local economies throughout the heartland. They have the nerve to call this agenda "centrist" even though poll after poll shows it is far out of the mainstream. Yet these centrists get slaughtered at the ballot box, and their counterparts -- the progressive economic populists -- are racking up wins and relegating the DLC argument to the scrap heap.

Yes - free trade is the enemy. Those brown people in other countries are taking our jobs! Maybe this should be the Democratic Party's new slogan:

Brown people on other continents: they want your jobs.

I'll start printing the bumper stickers.

But seriously folks, where did all of this hatred of capitalism come from? Why is always the corporations' faults? They (apparently) caused us to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, rigged the voting in Florida (in 2004!), and took over the Democratic Party.

I find this sort of paranoia just as unproductive as the idea that "Big Government" is out to get us.

Stupidity dissected paragraph by paragraph

The Next DNC Chair: Why You Should Care

By Arianna Huffington

December 08, 2004

This Saturday in Orlando, at a meeting of state party chairs, a parade of potential candidates are going to be making the case for why they should be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.

A "committee chair" is a meaningless blowhard who goes on television and sprew partisan hackery on the cable news shows.

I don't have a candidate. But I do have a litmus test: Anyone raising the idea that the party needs to "move to the middle" should immediately be escorted out of the building. Better yet, a trap door should open beneath them, sending them plummeting down an endless chute into electoral purgatory -- which is exactly where the party will be permanently headquartered if it continues to adopt such a strategy.

Electoral purgatory must be the place where the other 80% of the country that's not liberal resides.

Among those eyeing the position are Howard Dean, former White House aide Harold Ickes, Texas Rep. Marty Frost, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, New Democrat Network founder Simon Rosenberg, political strategist Donnie Fowler, and telecom exec Leo Hindery.

Although less than 450 people will ultimately decide who becomes the next party chair, when the DNC votes on Feb. 12, the outcome will have a profound effect on shaping the party's future. Will Democrats continue to toe the strategy line of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that has brought them to the brink of permanent minority-party status? Or will they finally return to the party's roots and recapture its lost political soul -- and the White House and Congress with it?

I thought the DLC put the Democrats into the White House. Oh, wait, I'm wrong. George Bush Sr. won a second term and Bob Dole succeeded him. My mistake.

Welcome to the Great Democratic Party Identity Crisis of 2005.

Welcome to my liberal bubble where the whole country believes in secular gun control and bigger government.

Ever since the election, Democratic leaders have been crawling over each other in a mad scramble to the middle. Indeed, this is the worst case of midriff bulge since Kirstie Alley stopped by Sizzler's all-you-can-eat buffet.

Forget the middle - obscure Bravo references will win the next election!

"Things are accomplished in the middle. We have to work toward the middle. And I think that that's clear." That was new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on "Meet the Press" this weekend. He didn't elaborate on what good was "clearly accomplished" in the middle over the past four years, but perhaps he was referring to the invasion of Iraq. Almost makes you long for the spineless bleating of Tom Daschle, doesn't it?

Would you rather the Senate Democrats work with moderate Republicans to block Bush's agenda or tell everyone to go to hell and sit on their hands? Governing is for grown ups, not cry babies.

Last week's meeting of the 21-strong Democratic Governors Association was similarly an orgy of centrist groping, best summed up by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who said, "This, for us, is our moment to push an agenda . . . that is centrist and that speaks to where most people are."

Yep, that's where most of the country is. But you could cite 100 different Gallup polls to these people and they wouldn't listen.

If Gov. Granholm, a rising star in the party, really thinks the center is where the majority of people were located this past election, the Democrats are in even worse trouble than we think. Have these people learned nothing from 2000, 2002 and 2004? How many more concession speeches do they have to give -- from "the center" -- before they realize it's not a very fruitful place?

We nominated a moderate in 2000 and he won the popular vote. We nominated a liberal in 2004 and he lost ground. Virginia nominated moderate Mark Warner and he's doing well. The Republicans were able to elect a moderate in California. It's called practicing pragmatism when faced with the cold harsh reality that the country will not support all of your policy positions. And no matter how many cafe lattes Arianna drinks, this country will remain a cold place for liberals.

Putting aside for a moment the question of the party's soul and focusing entirely on hardball politics, running to the middle has been proven to be the single stupidest strategy the Democrats can pursue.

We didn't run to the middle this year. We ran to the left. The far left hijacked the party and it's moderate message and ran rampant with television ads that didn't make any sense (MoveOn) and a boring movie (Moore).

As cognitive psychologist George Lakoff told me: "Democrats moving to the middle is a double disaster that alienates the party's progressive base while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the other side is where the good ideas are." It unconsciously locks in the notion that the other side's positions are worth moving toward, while your side's positions are the ones to move away from. Plus every time you move to the center, the right just moves further to the right.

There isn't any proof that the right is getting more extreme. The right is the right. They're crazy, but they've always been crazy. It's the Republican Party that has moved to the right. And that gives the Democrats a unique opportunity to seize the middle and become an uber majority party that can't be stopped. How? We cut the moderates out of the Republican Party.

And if middle-of-the-roadism is such a great vote-getter, why don't we see Republicans moving there? In fact, framing the political debate in right-left terms is so old, so tired, and so wrong that we need to resist all temptation to do so. There is nothing left-wing about wanting corporations to pay their fair share rather than hide their profits in PO boxes in Bermuda, or in ensuring access to health care now rather than paying the bill at the emergency room later.

Republicans are moving to the right because they've finally pealed nearly all of the old-line conservative Democrats away from our party. Now they can comfortably lean to the right. For now. If we take away their old base of country club fiscally conservative cultural moderates, we'll be in a great position.

That's why the DNC race is so important. The party needs a chairman able to drive a stake through the heart of its bankrupt GOP-lite strategy and champion the populist economic agenda that has already proven potent at the ballot box in many conservative parts of the country. Just how potent is revealed in "The Democrats' Da Vinci Code," a brilliant upcoming American Prospect cover story by David Sirota that shows how a growing number of Democrats in some of the reddest regions in America have racked up impressive, against-the-grain wins by framing a progressive economic platform in terms of values and right vs. wrong. These are not "left" ideas; they are good ideas.

Name these Democrats. Where are they? You're making this up, Arianna. The Democrats who have won in red states are the same centrist governors that you smeared earlier.

"This," writes Sirota, "is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans." These red-state progressives have brought the Democratic Party back to its true calling and delivered, according to Sirota, "as powerful a statement about morality and authenticity as any of the GOP's demagoguery on `guns, God, and gays.'"

Actually, they've adopted the GOP's demagoguery on guns and God and straddled the fence on gays.

This strategy of economic populism coincides perfectly with what is the most significant shift in Democratic politics in a generation: the astounding growth of a grassroots donor base. Thanks in no small part to the Internet, the Kerry campaign and the DNC raised between them over $300 million from grassroots donors. Kerry alone raised over $71 million from donors who contributed $200 or less. What's more, the DNC experienced a sevenfold increase in donors -- skyrocketing from 400,000 in 2000 to the 2.7 million who contributed in 2004.

Yes, we have an active base that's been whipped up into a fury, given torches and pitch forks, and told that moderates are the monster that lives in the dark mansion on the hill.

This reallocation of power away from lobbyists and big corporate donors will finally allow Democrats to stop taking policy dictation from their corporate financiers and start offering up an alternative vision to compete with George Bush's. But only if the will is there -- which means only if the next DNC chair understands and embraces this tectonic shift.
And only if he promises, at all costs, to stop playing in the middle of the road.

It all comes back to those "corporate financiers". If we just get rid of them...

Meanwhile, for the last 4 years in Virginia, "corporate financiers" have very publicly shifted their partisan allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats, simply because Mark Warner has done two things:

1. He ran as a moderate.
2. He forged friendships with moderate Republicans in the Virginia legislature. This allowed him to cut the right-wing of the Republican party out of all legislative deals - despite the fact that the GOP has a 61-39 majority in the House of Delegates.

Republicans used to do this to us...

Why the Democrats are doomed in 2008

Most liberals believe that we nominated an electable candidate this year. They believe that we cast aside Howard Dean because he was "too liberal" and replaced him with an electable candidate. They feel like they "bit the bullet" and went ahead and supported the most electable candidate.

They didn't. They nominated a liberal from Massachusetts with no accomplishments in the Senate.

In 2008, the liberal wing of the party will say, "Never again. We tried nominating an 'electable' candidate and we lost to George Bush. Now it's time to do things our way. We're going to nominate the most liberal candidate we can find because that's what the country wants. They want a liberal. The American people will come out in droves for a liberal. The magical non-voters who don't care about politics will emerge from thier underworld and vote for the Democrats, if we just help them. The results in 2004 prove that the country is desperate for a liberal candidate."

And if we seem like we're going to do that, I'll probably start up "Democrats for McCain".

"I'm a Reform Democrat!"

If you read liberal blogs like I do, you've undoubtedly noticed an annoying trend: liberals are calling themselves "reform democrats". Their mantra: "We don't need to move to the right or the left, we need to reform the Democratic party!"

In other words, we need to have a big meeting. And at this meeting, we need to decide to reform the party. What kind of reform? No one knows. Just reform. "Modernization". We'll "change the party". We'll do...something.

These "reform Democrats" think they're railing against "the establishment" but the truth is that they are the establishment. They spout the same tired liberal whiny arguments that we've heard for decades. They are the status quo. It's people like Kos, Atrios, and Michael Moore who need to be swept away. They are dinosaurs.

The real reformers are in the New Dem Network, the DLC, and NGA (Mark Warner). They're the ones proposing "progressive" policy. They're the ones that will take this party into the future. And they are the only ones with any record of success during the last two decades. Sure, they've made mistakes, but they're better than the alternative strategy: blame every national problem on Enron and Halliburton!

And one other thing: People give Joe Trippi too much credit for "revolutionizing" campaigns. First of all, McCain was the first to use the internet successfully. Second of all, any idiot could figure out that the internet was a useful tool to use to raise money and mobilize supporters. Quit lionizing this guy. He ran a losing primary campaign where he managed to make the whole country believe that a relatively moderate governor (compared to John Kerry) was a wild-eyed liberal. Great job, Trippi.

Social Security

It's not ever going bankrupt, as I've pointed out before (and many people keep reminding me).

But that doesn't mean we need to stick with the same system. Partial privatization promises to deliver higher benefits. In the end, that's what matters - putting more money in the hands of seniors so that they can retire in style.

Do I think Bush is the one to tinker with social security? Probably not, because he's an idiot. So let's put it aside, for now.

The war on Moore

Peter Beinhart declares war on Michael Moore in this week's issue of TNR:

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947 [when they began to purge communists]. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

Beinhart is basically saying, "To hell with the lefty peaceniks and Michael Moore. Let them go vote for Nader, stay home, or even vote for a third party Dean (if that makes them feel better). We'll take the center."

In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.

The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily communists themselves. But they refused to make anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the threat to liberal values came entirely from the right--from militarists, from red-baiters, and from the forces of economic reaction. To attack the communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil rights and economic justice, was a distraction from the struggle for progress.

Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naïvely consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

(I always thought that Moore's ridiculous opposition to the war in Afghanistan would kill his credibility amongst liberals. I guess not.)

If Moore is America's leading individual soft, liberalism's premier soft organization is MoveOn. MoveOn was formed to oppose Clinton's impeachment, but, after September 11, it turned to opposing the war in Afghanistan. A MoveOn-sponsored petition warned, "If we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban, we become like the terrorists we oppose."

By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with 9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman. One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to "[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the bombing," and to "[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of global unity and support for international law." Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for the CIA and the deployment of American troops to assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines. In October 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that the United States should have "utilize[d] international law and judicial procedures, including due process" against bin Laden and that "it's possible that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban."

Remember those REALLY liberal people who, after 9-11, told you that "bombing doesn't solve anything"?

I've been thinking this for a while though. Why not ditch Michael Moore and the far left? In an effort to keep 3% of the country from voting for Nader, John Kerry pandered to these people and alienated the rest of the country. Why bother?

One more thing: I honestly don't know what Michael Moore thinks about the threat of terrorism. All I know is that he hates capitalism.

Coming soon...

www.Trafficwonk.blogspot.com

Republican Lite

So if we move to the center (I'm told), we'll just be emulating the Republicans. Where are these centrist Republicans?

All I see is right-wingers and a couple of 70 year old moderates who will retire any day now.