There's a lie which I am getting more than a little tired of, which is repeated ad nauseum by right-wingers and keeps getting picked up by the mainstream media. It involves the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or any other Democrat, being "extreme left" -- when they hardly qualify as left-wing at all.
Howard Dean balanced the Vermont budget while cutting taxes, and supports gun rights.
Hillary Clinton opposed single-payer national health care and has given speeches supporting mandatory age regulation for video games.
All of the above support international free trade agreements when they're written properly, and sometimes even when they're not.
Al Gore may qualify as a moderate; Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton are clearly conservatives by any pre-1980 standard. The so-called "extreme leftists" would run the Democratic Party along lines significantly to the right of FDR, Truman, or Carter.
What distinguishes the people who get called "extreme left" from those who don't seems to be whether they have any backbone. If they stand up for what they believe in -- even if it's a balanced budget, cutting taxes, or realpolitik in international affairs, traditionally conservative causes -- they're called "extreme left". If they're unscrupulous hacks, they might not get described that way.
Apart from being a big lie, this is an insult to the real extreme leftists, who support causes ranging from abolishing corporate legal rights, to guaranteed minimum income, to total unilateral disarmament, to the abolition of government. About the only things a real extreme leftist can find to like about Howard Dean are that he's honest, well-meaning, and supports democracy. [[EDIT: which is not to imply that those are small or unimportant things -- and competence should go in that list too.]]
Meanwhile, the right wing has lost all semblance of conservatism, and is practicing wild, radical policies of dramatic change with no evidence that it's for the better. It's simply not legitimate to call them conservative any more. But that's another diary.
Anyway, whenever I read that a majority of Americans consider themselves conservative, I immediately think that they should be voting for Howard Dean's Democratic Party -- it probably corresponds closely to their values, certainly much closer than George W. Bush's so-called Republican Party.