Politico wisdom:
For the past couple of decades, the most successful national Democrats have been practitioners of defensive politics. These candidates practiced the politics of reassurance — letting independent voters know that they were not as secular, not as dovish, not as socially liberal as the popular perception of national Democrats.
VandeHei and Harris must be thinking about the wildly popular and newly elected senator from Tennessee, Harold Ford, Jr.:
“I do not support the decision today reached by the New Jersey Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November there’s a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage – I am voting for it.”
And not the failed politician from Montana, Jon Tester:
“I don’t want to weaken the Patriot Act, I want to repeal it. What it does, it takes away your freedom … and when you take away our freedoms, the terrorists have won.”
Oh wait…they said national Democrats. In the last couple decades? That would be…Bill Clinton and…uh…hmm…
So, apparently, the only way to win if you are a Democrat is if you run as Bill Clinton redux.
We have one of those candidates, but apparently even she isn’t good enough. In any case, it’s all bloggers’ fault.
The liberal dream is suddenly within reach: a Senate with enough Democrats after the 2008 elections to create a muscular governing majority for a progressive agenda for the first time in a generation.
Harry Reid’s mission is to make the liberal dream come true. Among his likely impediments: liberal activists with little patience for the kind of delicate political positioning that will be needed for victory…
The anti-war movement may be a powerful horse for Democrats, but is also an untamed one.
Yeah…we’re so untamed that I can’t get any bloggers to get behind an opposition to Bob Kerrey’s recruitment for Chuck Hagel’s seat in Nebraska. As for Politico, they think all Democrats should be like Kerrey:
Kerrey, for example, is hardly a MoveOn Democrat. He wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Left’s Iraq Muddle,” in which he took liberals to task over Iraq.
See? That’s how a Beltway approved Democrat acts.