Back in 2005, the beltway's premier publication, the National Journal, did a cover story on us netroots crazies then starting to flex our muscles. The publication gave us permission to reprint the article, so you can read it yourself.
But Armando, who wrote that post, dug up two quotes which couldn't be more representative of the Netroots/DLC disagreement. The first is me and MoveOn's Eli Parisher:
. . . "We are actually starting to build the kind of noise machine, to reward or beat up on people, that the Right has had for a long time," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, 33, the pugnacious founder of the popular blog Daily Kos. "We are training these politicians that they don't have to be afraid of taking courageous stands -- and that they will be rewarded or punished based on their behavior.". . . The Democratic Internet base cradling that trigger does not speak with one voice. But the emerging generation of online Democratic activists, many of them young and shaped by the bruising partisan conflicts of the past decade, seems united most by the belief that the quickest way for Democrats to regain power is to confront Bush more forcefully and to draw brighter lines of division between the Democratic Party and the GOP.
. . . In strikingly similar language, Internet-generation Democratic activists from Moulitsas to Eli Pariser, the 24-year-old executive director of MoveOn's giant PAC, describe Clinton's effort to reorient the party toward capturing centrist voters as "obsolete" in a highly partisan era that demands, above all, united opposition against the GOP. Moulitsas and Pariser, like most other voices in the Internet activist base, want a Democratic Party focused more on increasing turnout among its partisans than on persuading moderate swing voters. Both, in other words, want a party that emulates Bush's political strategy more than Clinton's.
Then let's see the DLC's approach:
[S]everal other centrist party strategists worry that the hyperpartisan turn-out-the-base strategy that many online activists demand won't work for Democrats, because polls consistently show that more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal.
"We are more of a coalition party than they are," says Ed Kilgore, the policy director for the DLC. "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win."
Two things happened in 2006 -- we forced people to pick sides (by giving them a choice, imagine that!), and they overwhelmingly sides with us, the Democrats. But not just Democratic voters, which we grew (especially among young voters), but also independents.
We're proud Democrats, confident and secure in the belief that we're on the right side of history and Americans will side with us if we can only get our message out.
The DLC thinks this is a conservative country and we can only win if we blur distinctions with the GOP.
And there it is, in a nutshell.
Update: Bowers looked at where the Democratic advantage in 2006 came from:
Overall Dem vote increase: 5.15%
Growth from Dem's: 2.41%
Growth from Ind's: 2.08%
Growth from Rep's: 0.66%
The triumph of the base. And when we reached out to the base, the indies (and some Republicans) came along as well.