Although kos does bring up some good points, in no way is The New Republican a conservative rag, in the same league with The National Review or The Weekly Standard. Just ask yourself: would the latter two ever run a cover story entitled "In Defense of Bush Hatred?" Or "Founding Fakers: How Rebel Leaders Are Duping the Right - Again." I sincerely doubt it.
Instead of being "The New Republican," it really would be more accurate to call our subject "The Neo Republic," given it's editorial makeup, which is primarily neoliberals and neoconservatives. The owners may be GOP (Hertzog) or right-leaning Dems, but they would never risk sacrificing TNR's aura of liberalism. It's too commercially useful, and gives them an influence completely disproportionate to their readership, as kos has pointed out. The latest example of this is their endorsement issue, featuring a freshly zombified Joe Lieberman on the cover. Despite, as expected, endorsing Lieberman, the issue contains four dissenting opinions that are far more pursuasive than the endorsement editorial. To add to this, we now have a "Online debate" on the issue in which Christopher Orr and Jonathan Chait savage the magazine's choice. Given this kind of schitzophrenia, which puts to shame anything even the most divided of Supreme Courts has ever produced, it's really hard to pigeonhole TNR into any description other than "mainstream."
This is where we get to the heart of the matter; right now, TNR represents the kind of moderate, occasionally mushy, inoffensive liberalism that the mainstream press loves to have on board for the sake of appearing balanced. Because of this, simply waging an anti-TNR campaign probably won't do much - their niche guarantees that the media and punditocracy will continue to have a demand for them. Instead, we have to turn this to our advantage while continuing to fight to get more true liberal voices out there: every time an argument is launched about how the Democrats are divided, with "even the New Republic" opposed to this, that, or the other, we can respond that "even the New Republic is divided." Fortunately, TNR continues to be willing to oblige us in this on almost every issue (the war and Israel being the biggest exceptions, thanks to Peretz). And if in the course of this, it's suggested that the debate inside TNR is between liberals and the likes of Andy Sullivan, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan - who even the mainstream press will not dare call liberal - then the story becomes about the battle within The Neo Republic rather than within the Democratic Party, and maybe we can neutralize this line of attack.