Update [2005-8-4 21:10:37 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando. Here is the antithesis to the Lincoln 1860/Politics of Contrast/Fighting Dems approach that I favor. I promote it here to illustrate the approach I completely disagree with. That said, I do not want to purge Lind, we are a Big Tent party. But I do want to defeat him in the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
The grown-ups over at
TPM Cafe are taking Democrats to woodshed for supporting silly notions like equal rights for gays, abortion rights for women, affirmative action, etc. In other words, Dems must become moderate Republicans if we want to win elections in America.
The United States has a right-of-center majority with respect to social issues and a a left-of-center majority with respect to economic issues. The stability of this popular consensus recently has been illustrated by the nearly simultaneous popular rejection of gay marriage and Social Security privatization. Social liberals are too far to the left of most Americans on social issues; economic conservatives are too far to the right of most Americans on economic issues.
This combination of moderate social conservatism with moderate economic liberalism explains the success of the New Deal Democrats and the failure of the party that succeeded them, the Civil Rights Democrats."
Lind doesn't mention the Iraq War, but presumably "grown-up" Democrats would stay the course and provide defacto support for the president.