I’ve been trying to work through in my mind why I found Mark Warner’s centrality at the Yearly Kos event so troubling. I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this, and putting the pieces together to make a clear narrative is difficult. After I posted my piece on Markos and Warner are Getting a Little Cozy, Delaware Dem responded with What Daily Kos Wants. And he made an important argument.

Daily Kos thus is not cozing up to the DLC crowd. The DLC Crowd is cozing up to Daily Kos. And we are within our rights as Kossacks to tell this crowd to go to Hell. The DLC Crowd, in courting our votes, will find out that they will have to change a hell of alot about where they stand in order to get our votes.

And that is a good thing.

That is what Daily Kos wants.

I don’t know how realistic it is to expect the DLC or any of its individual members to “change a hell of a lot about where they stand” on our foreign policy. Jerome Armstrong asked me in my thread over there why I didn’t focus on Warner’s job as Governor. The reason why I am not focused on that is because the Governor of Virginia is not responsible for our foreign policy. And I consider our foreign policy to be a disaster of unprecedented dimensions. So, the first thing I am looking for in a candidate is someone who is willing to fundamentally question the basic thrust of, not just Bush’s foreign policy, but our whole post-Cold War foreign policy.

Daily Kos is many things and, as Markos says, It’s [not] All About [Him]. But we need to go back and look at what made Daily Kos so successful. It wasn’t just the neat Scoop software. It was the fact that Markos (and his other fine front-pagers) were a voice of reason in a time of national insanity. Namely, they were anti-war when no one else was allowed to be anti-war. They were calling bullshit on the intelligence, on the threat, on the media coverage, on the questions about our patriotism, on the French bashing, on all of it…when no other voices could be heard. Some people might advance some other theories that explain the success of Daily Kos, but I think it was the fact that is was a sanctuary of sanity, calmness, and reason in the run-up to the war.

There are many mainstream journalists, cable news people, and politicians that have egg on their faces today. Each of them has to come to terms with their mistakes in their own way. Some are abjectly apologetic. Others insist they were right but Bush screwed everything up. Still others think we should let bygones be bygones and finish the job we started. Mark Warner and Joe Lieberman both fit into this last category.

At the end of November [2005], then-Virginia governor Mark Warner said,“This Democrat doesn’t think we need to re-fight how we got into (the Iraq war). Warner has also stated, “regardless of whether we like how we got there, we need to finish the task. ”A speechwriter for former Virginia governor Doug Wilder concluded, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Bush and Warner positions on Iraq nor an ounce of criticism of the war in this speech.”

November 2005 was when Harry Reid shut down the Senate, saying:

SEN. HARRY REID: America deserves better than this. They also deserve a searching and comprehensive investigation into how the Bush administration brought this country to war. Key questions that need to be answered include:

– How did the Bush administration assemble its case for war against Iraq? We heard what Colonel Wilkerson said.
– Who did the Bush administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?
– How did the senior administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?
– What was the role of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics? We know what Colonel Wilkerson says.
– How did the administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the administration’s assertions? We know what happened to them — I listed a few.
– Why has this administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that would shed light on their misconduct and the misstatements?

Unfortunately, the Senate committee that should be taking the lead in providing these answers is not. Despite the fact that the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine these questions more than a year and a half ago, he has chosen not to keep that commitment. Despite the fact that he restated the commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing. …

Mr. President, enough time has gone by. I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that Senate go into closed session.

Now, let’s look at what Markos told Tim Russert about why is he is supporting Ned Lamont in Connecticut.

Russert: “Why are you so in favor of Ned Lamont, and against Joe Lieberman, who was AL GORE’S CHOICE to be the Vice Presidential Democratic nominee in 2000?”

Markos: “Joe Lieberman has consistently undermined Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats’ efforts to remain unified on issue after issue, he is basically caught up in the fiction that things are still going fine in Iraq, and long-term, even on the issue of Social Security, when Bush tried to privatize Social Security last year, Joe Lieberman was the last Democrat to fall in line. He consistently undermines the caucus, and we understand…just as the Republicans do…that a strong, unified party will be much better in opposition and much more likely to actually win and take over the Senate…and the House, for that matter…than having a party that has its members constantly undermining it.”

Markos knows that the biggest gripe we have with Lieberman is over his support for the war, including his comment that “We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.” But he also blames Lieberman for stepping on the Democrats’ message on a variety of issues.

Well, what do we call Warner’s response to Harry Reid shutting down the Senate but a stepping on the messsage? And how do we interpret his statement, “I think we need to focus more on how to finish it… To set an arbitrary deadline or specific date is not appropriate”, as not stepping Murtha’s message? Most importantly, what is distinguishing Mark Warner from Joe Lieberman on the two biggest issues of the day: how we got into Iraq and how we get out?

I know that many will argue that Lieberman is a serial offender and that is the distiction. But, I’d rebut that by saying that Lieberman isn’t running for President. I’d also argue that Iraq is the most important issue, not Social Security.

So, it is very strange to see Markos going on Meet the Press to bash Lieberman a day after he introduced Warner to the Yearly Kos conference and did not object when the organizers allowed him to play a four-minute infomercial and hand out free Yearly Kos t-shirts with his face on them.

And this gets us back to the beginning. One major distinction between Lieberman and Warner is that Warner is willing, eager even, to embrace the netroots. Perhaps, as Delaware Dem said, we can have some kind of positive influence on Warner.

So, let’s look at why the National Review Online thinks Warner is a pretty cool Democrat:

Warner criticized John Kerry for never breaking “with anything in Democratic orthodoxy” and declared, “Democrats aren’t the majority party in this country.”He credited President Reagan for “truly [making] Americans feel proud again in the early ‘80s.” When asked for his role model, he named Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. He has supported the death penalty (eleven times, with one high-profile granting of clemency) and signed every piece of NRA-backed gun legislation that crossed his desk. He supports welfare reform, a ban on partial-birth abortion (with exceptions for “the health of the mother”) and parental notification on abortion, and he opposes same-sex marriage. He signed a fetal-homicide bill, designating the murder of a pregnant woman as two separate killings. He has attacked Washington Democrats for “defending the same government programs, thinking they are going to get us new results” and has said, “simply putting up new tariff structures or ones that restrict trade—I believe does not play to the long-term interests of the United States.”

This brings me to the crux of the matter. I like Mark Warner as a person. I think he is an attractive candidate in a lot of ways. But, he represents a school of thought that runs totally counter to what I believe the progressive netroots movement should be all about. It’s nothing personal. This is strictly about how we differ in our analysis of why we have been losing elections. For Warner, it’s because we have been to stuck in the mud of failed Great Society programs and too dogmatic about choice. We don’t appeal to America’s greatness enough (like Reagan). This is not an analysis without merit. Kerry didn’t even bother to campaign in about 23 states because his position of women’s and gay’s rights were deemed to doom his chances. When you start a campaign giving away 40% the electoral college votes without a fight, something is wrong.

The question is, is that ‘something that is wrong’ the values you espouse…or something else? For me, the problem has been the right-wing dominance of the political narrative in this country. The progressive issues we care about consistently poll better than the conservative agenda. They are mainstream positions. But they are portrayed as fringe leftist views, or stale legacies of the sixties and seventies. We’re told that we keep losing elections because we are too progressive. But I think the whole point of the progressive blogosphere should be to even the playing field so that our mainstream views are seen as mainstream political ideas.

And this brings me to my final point. Markos says the following about Maureen Dowd’s column:

And how crazy was it that we were doing things that were “mainstream”, huh? As though we’re doing all of this gate crashing in order to remain on the outside…

He’s absolutely right. We are not doing this to remain on the outside. But, we are also not doing this to just replace the people that are on the inside. We are doing this to change the paradigm that says we have to sell out women’s rights, or we have to give up on national health care, or that we have to be for the same huge military expenditures as the Republicans, because we can’t compete otherwise. We’re in this to change what is possible and to revive progressive politics in this country.

We are trying to do it at all levels, from a new army of progressives entering into the lower levels of politics as committeepersons, delegates, ward leaders, state reps and senators, etc…to a new loud message machine to match that of the right and of the mainstream…to providing organizing tools…to whatever else.

And, it seems to me that if Delaware Dem is correct, and the DLC coming to us is a sign of their moderation, then we can be thankful for the leverage we’ve obtained. But, it seems like there is a great risk of the entire progressive project being co-opted.

When I look at Mark Warner I see a good man that is qualified to be President. I see a man that has all the personal attributes you’d like to see in a politician. I see a man that is showing us all a lot of respect and that is listening. I see a man that could very well break the red/blue impasse and win some of the 23 states that are currently considered unwinnable for a traditional Democrat. But, I also see a man that believes passionately, not in the power of the netroots to reinvigorate progressive politics, but a man with a different plan. The other plan. The plan that doesn’t believe we can make our ideas palatable anymore.

So, why is it a big deal that Warner was given such a central role and warm reception at Yearly Kos? Because, despite Yearly Kos not being all about Markos, it steps on the Daily Kos message. It’s steps on the Lieberman message. And it steps on the message of all the other progressive bloggers, too.

I believe we can take back our party from the DLC, from the triangulators, from the big corporate donors and lobbyists. But, I worry that our biggest site, the site that is on Meet the Press and in all the big papers, is muddling the message.

When we get on the inside, we need to be different. If we can win Warner over and get him to believe in the viability of progressive politics, then that is great. If we have any influence at all, it’s better than none. But, we can do better. At least, I believe we can.