I have no desire to beat up on Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney. I’ll simply note that both of them espoused some ideas that were outside the mainstream of progressive thought and that you’d be hard-pressed to find well-known progressive bloggers who hold either of them in high regard. Most people I know felt that Kucinich and McKinney were poor spokespeople for our values because they were extreme is some respects and because they were more committed to self-promotion than to progressive causes and values. Neither of them, however, ever won a nomination to run for the U.S. Senate and then lost an easy opportunity to pick up a seat in the upper chamber. Democrats, including their committed progressive base, still display a degree of pragmatism that is sorely lacking on the Republican side. I can’t explain exactly why the progressive base of the party doesn’t nominate unelectable candidates on a routine basis, but it isn’t the result of any conspiracy from the Establishment. It doesn’t really help that some nutty Republicans have won (e.g., Mike Lee in Utah, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and Ted Cruz in Texas). They won because they were running in states that were more hostile to Democrats than Colorado or Indiana or Missouri or Nevada or Alaska or North Dakota or Delaware. The fact that Cruz and Paul and Lee are in the Senate makes it less likely that the Republicans can compete in modestly red or purple states. Most people still see extremism as a vice.
I don’t know if William F. Buckley would treat the modern day Tea Party like the latter-day John Birch Society, or not. I just know that anyone who wants to see the president’s birth certificate is part of the problem for the Republicans.
Because the progressive base of the Democratic Party is not as powerful as the extremist base of the Republican Party? Just guessin’ here.
I think more likely it’s not as big a percentage as the RW base in the Republican party.
Or the fact that corporations and rich individuals fund the Teahadist-type organizations. Why else would Adelson fund a loser like Newt? To try and drag the conversation to the right of course. Who on the left does that? Not when you have corrupt hacks like DWS and Steve Israel leading the party.
We may not nominate unelectable people on a routine basis but our staying home in large numbers in 2010 helped to elect a lot of destructive tea party Republicans.
A good look at who stayed home is informative. The canard (or brag) that progressive purists flipped this election is incorrect.
Some fault goes to the fact that there was no GOTV campaign quite like the OfA operation in Presidential years. Some fault goes to a whole lot of Blue Dog Democratic candidates who ran away from President Obama’s policy, thus legitimizing the right-wing notions that they were something to fear. And then in state after state, there was the GOP’s outright lying about the ACA cutting Medicare (the same nonsense Romney pushed this year).
A lot of new voters didn’t vote in this election for the same reason they fail to mark downticket races in election year. The Presidential race (regardless of who is running) is the star attraction in most voters’ minds.
A good look at who stayed home is informative. The canard (or brag) that progressive purists flipped this election is incorrect.
Indeed. The Democrats lost a lot more people in the middle than on the left between 2008 and 2010.
If anyone’s explanation for the 2010 elections doesn’t begin with, and spend most of their time dwelling on, “it’s the economy, stupid,” they’re trying to sell you something.
Daniel Foster kind of reminds me of Jonah Goldberg–a certain facility with words, no facility at all with critical thought. So you get this farrago that sounds fairly cogent until you realize you’re not even sure what he thinks he’s trying to say.
In this case, if he’s saying that the Tea Party doesn’t represent the mainstream of the American right, it’s just lucky for him that polling is among the things the American Right doesn’t believe in anymore, or else he’d have to confront evidence of how wrong he is.
Like the new poll showing that 49% of Republicans think ACORN helped Obama steal the election. So 49% is less than half right? So it’s a fringe belief. Of course, a lot of the other 51% undoubtedly think the election was stolen by some other organization that actually exists.
I can’t explain exactly why the progressive base of the party doesn’t nominate unelectable candidates on a routine basis
Because they aren’t really the base. They are one relatively small segment within the coalition.
As opposed to the Republican Party, in which the Tea Party voters really are a majority of the primary electorate, or something close to it. This gives them the votes, and it also makes them relevant enough for major power brokers to take up with them, such as FreedomWorks, the Kochs, and the other astroturfers.
The left has nothing remotely similar to the Club for Growth (sic) or Grover Norquist. Considering the economics, how could there be?