Always a religious experience! hehe

They view this as a battle with US, not a battle for the party and the base.  Amazing.  They're the ones who can't get there from here.  They're pull date is up, and they need to go.

GOP politics is just different. Party leadership doesn't respond to constituent pressure as much as they pick the tension-spots that will always exist in a diverse democracy and then tell their base that one point of view is what "real Americans" think and whip them into a frenzy under the false pretense that whatever the issue is can be "fixed".

Immigration is a good example here. Undocumented immigration from Mexico has been more-or-less unchanged in our lifetimes. Yet, to hear the GOP tell it, its an unprecedented crisis of epic proportions that must be "fixed" right now.

The difference between the parties boils down to the difference between sales and marketing. Dems do sales. They try to figure out what people want and then craft ways to meet the need. The GOP does marketing. They gin up artificial needs based on their existing product.

Thus, the perception that the GOP base is "getting what it wants" is an illusion. They are just getting what they've already been sold.

And it disgusted me.  O'Donnell's attitude was patronizing enough, but I also detected a hint of exasperation in his voice, as if we were misbehaving children who were embarrassing him in public despite his best efforts.

saying about the activists they'd pissed off even before people like Abraham Lincoln, their IL State Party Chairman walked out on them.

The Democratic / Whig path can be summarized as:

• get it wrong on the "issues of the time"
• piss off the activists
• ???
• profit

What issue is most likely to persuade low-information Democrats from joining the rush to the exits in 2010?

Probably generic hillarycare which is already going off the rails in MA, which our local "Democratic" leaders want to unload on us in California, and which all three major Democratic candidates + Dodd want to push down the throats of the whole nation.

If the discovery from a postcard issued by the new Federal or CA hillarycare bureaucracy like this:

meaning that we MUST buy Federally (or state) approved private health care insurance doesn't get the truth across to the low-information Democratic voter that the elected part of the Democratic Party is not on our side. . . forget organized progressive political action, it'll be time for us to look for individual strategies for the future; find a way to survive America sliding into the toilet or look for somewhere else to live.

Do I have to spot him at the table or can I spot him slumped against a wall?