My comment here is more directed at Kos' posting on Herseth than anything, as I wanted it to get max. attention rather than being all the way down on the thread. I think that we shouldn't impose a litmus test here, first because it seems just from scrolling through comments on that post like Herseth's position is more unclear than initially presented, and also because even still the woman clearly is a strong progressive on the rest of the issues, even if she is smart enough not to play up, say, foreign policy in a House race in SD. Call me too willing to cave in spite of the fact that if you check out my blog you'll see half the posts lately are on my disgust at the FMA and why this makes me hate Bush more than anything else, but I have no problem with helping out someone who I probably agree with on everything EXCEPT this, especially since this is different from any other House race in so far as it, along with Chandler, impacts the sense of national momentum.
But my main reason has to do with my experience at the DCCC this summer and something I learned about why they have had such a hard time getting money to competitive races relative to Republicans. One of the big things that has inhibited them in the past has been a huge gap between the parties in Member Fundraising-- that is, Republicans in Congress giving far more and far more widely to the party congressional committees and individual candidates than we did. The reason: due to stratification from re-districting, most competitive House races are in center-right territory and most actual House Dems are in safe territory. So thus, reasoned most liberal Dems for the better part of the time since we lost Congress, why the hell should I give my money to a Blue Dog from a district where they often don't like people in my district much? Thus, while Republicans united despite their individual differences, our Members divided themselves regionally and politically, imposing litmus tests on one another rather than working for the overall good of the party and the greater liberal cause.
Fortunately, the extremism of the GOP since the 2002 elections, including procedurally hamstringing Dems and screwing over their constituents with impunity, has basically made that all a moot point and unified the caucus. A good part of why congressional Dems have been doing slightly better lately is that Member giving to one another and the DCCC has risen sharply, as people have pooled together on common concerns rather than imposing the old litmus tests. Ben Chandler's election is a case in point-- the guy is tied at the hip to the NRA, yet people as fervently pro-gun-control as John Lewis went up and campaigned vigorously for him. The GOP has been doing things this way for years as I said-- while i was at the DCCC, for example, we put out a press release on how Tom DeLay's corrupt, corporate-funded PAC was giving money to Jack Quinn of NY, probably the most pro-labor/protectionist Republican out there and a maverick on a couple of other issues. They of course have no problem with Quinn however, because while he is truly out there in opposing their agenda on issues that his union backers and constituents care the most about, other than those issues he is a full-out party loyalist who will end up with an 80% or so rating from the American Conservative Union at the end of the day.
So I think we would be shooting ourselves in the foot if the blogosphere, which has the potential to be a great engine for Democrats, decided to deliberately let the other side have the advantage over litmus tests (even legitimate concerns and genuinely historic/emotional issues like this) and act the fractured way that our party's actual Members did for quite some time. Yeah, we should have standards for supporting people of course, I wouldn't ask people to communally give money to someone whose platform was basically DLC-strategy-driven. But Herseth, whose 2002 campaign was repeatedly lauded as an example of what the DLC overlooked as potentially viable in Red States by John Nichols in the Nation (that's pretty much how I'd heard of her before this special election), is definitely not that kind of a candidate. At the end of the day, she will, if elected, probably be getting something like a 80-90% record from liberal groups like Americans for Democratic Action, LCV, NARAL, and, dare I say, Human Rights Campaign. Given that, and given the national significance of this election, I see no reason why to not encourage giving to her.