When you get big and you have a conference in Las Vegas and make appearances on Meet the Press, the long knives come out and start looking for anything and everything they can find to reduce your influence and marginalize you. Byron York recycles the mercenary story. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post delves into your prior business dealings. You get blog entries like this one: Dear Kos, When Your Swim With Sharks, Don’t Cut Yourself that use me, to attack you. Let’s be frank, there are sharks in the water and they are looking to do damage to Daily Kos and to drive wedges withing the lefty blogosphere wherever they can.
I have no intention of playing into the hands of unscrupulous people that have our worst interests at heart. I will not air our laundry. What I will do, is define what I see as the differences between the green and the orange. When former Reagan Republican James Webb won the Democratic nomination to contest Senator George Allen’s seat Glenn Reynold’s moronically wrote:
A reader emails: “Don’t you think it’s also bad news for the left fringe of the Democrat party? I think it shows that voters will not support the Howard Dean-Kos-fringe and it makes for interesting times as Democrats try to find a presidental candidate for 2008.” Yes, when Democrats move to the center, it’s bad news for both Republicans and the Democratic far-left
And Markos, who actually supported Webb, responded:
Like Webb, I used to be a Republican. You guys can keep talking about the “far left fringe of the Democratic Party”, but if you were intellectually honest you’d acknowledge that it doesn’t live at Daily Kos. We’re backing centrist to conservative Democrats in Virginia (Webb), Montana (Tester and Schweitzer), Kansas (Sebelius), Pennsylvania (Casey), and so on.
The caricature you guys are trying to paint simply doesn’t meet reality.
So, let’s meet reality. Markos is claiming a centrist to conservative Democratic pedigree, at least to the extent of embracing the above candidates. I was vocally opposed to Casey in the Pennsylvania primary and I didn’t lift a finger to help Tester (which was probably an error in judgment on my part). I took no position on the Virginia primary. I do not claim to represent or to reflect a centrist to conservative constituency. My goals are to utilize the tool of the blogosphere to move the center of American politics to the left, not to elect a centrist Democratic Congress with a bare majority.
Reynolds’s “Howard Dean-Kos-fringe” monikor is a mischaracterization. Howard Dean was never that far left (fringe) and Daily Kos’s editorial policy was never that far left (fringe). The only thing that might be considered fringe is the actual make-up of the Daily Kos community, which is whiter than the Democratic Party, more highly educated than the Democratic Party, more affluent then the Democratic Party, and (nonetheless) more radical than the editorial board of that site.
Daily Kos is about ‘winning’ not ideology. There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the strategies that I advocate and the strategies that are advocated at Daily Kos, MyDD, and other community websites. But, Daily Kos has a special place in the heirarchy. Daily Kos has the megaphone. And, Daily Kos is not pushing a specifically progressive agenda, although it sometimes claims that mantle.
Despite the fact that Markos has been completely consistent that he is not anti-war but anti-this-war, and despite his attacks on single-issue groups, and despite his efforts to disassociate himself from the women’s studies set, the hippies, and the conspiracy theorists, the right-wing is continually trying to paint him as a radical fringe leftist. He doesn’t want that moniker and he doesn’t deserve it. We shouldn’t allow him, and the Daily Kos community, to be painted with that brush. They want to marginalize the orange place. But the orange place is very much in the mainstream of political discourse.