First of all, I'd like to say Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there including my grandmother, mom and sisters.

Second, I'd like to give a shout out to all the folks who volunteered yesterday for Vote for Change all over the nation.  Here in Hayward, California, we registered over 350 new voters yesterday and over 100 of us, young and old, learned the ins and outs of registering voters in Alameda County one of the largest Democratic counties in the nation.

Finally, I'd like to salute Barack Obama's newest Super Delegate, Crystal Strait of the Young Democrats. Crystal, who works for the California Democratic Party and was instrumental in getting local bloggers credentialed to attend the convention in San Jose last month. Her advocacy for youth voters and their core issues is a welcome addition to Obama's team.

This diary is about taking a look at the road ahead in 2008 as Democrats and Progressives...

There is a bigger question before us tonight than whether and when Barack Obama will be named the nominee of the Democratic Party for 2008, though that eventuality is, I promise you, a certainty.

The bigger question is this: what are you and I going to do, what role are we going to play in this the second election cycle in what has been a battle for governance of the United States? And, more importantly, what, collectively, will our actions, our words and our organization mean to the Democratic Party and to the future of our nation in 2008?

The Clinton campaign has run a gambit since Pennsylvania.

They've found a strategy and they've doubled down.

After Pennsylvania, the press, the pollsters and the pundits started talking about "white working class voters" and the Clinton campaign ran with it. After Pennsylvania, the press, the pollsters and the pundits ran another cycle of Rev. Wright's rants and the Clinton campaign ran with it.

So, in anticipation of Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton doubled down.

Clinton pandered on a gas tax and on guns. She reaffirmed her talk about "obliterating Iran." She expressed "outrage" about Rev. Wright on Bill O'Reilly's show. She lambasted economists as elitist. She vilified Wall Street as if she and Bill had never met or taken a dollar from anyone who worked for Bear Stearns or Morgan Stanley.

The Clinton campaign has triangulated to such an extent that, at this point, she is running to the right of Joe Lieberman.

That's saying something...

Bill and Hillary Clinton are in a tough spot.

After years of weathering attacks from a vast right wing conspiracy, the Clinton brand has been irretrievably damaged by the only agent with the power and credibility to tarnish the luster of the family name, the Clintons themselves.

If Hillary Clinton wins North Carolina and Indiana, as she may well yet do, it will be because she treated Democratic primary voters to one more round of Mark Penn inspired right-wing pandering on guns, the gas tax, NAFTA revisionism and obliterating Iran.

That may win her North Carolina and Indiana but in the process Bill and Hillary Clinton have lost their souls, if not what little moral authority they had to ask our party to extend this process till Denver.

Why has the gas tax pander set me off so much?

Let me give you five reasons: Dominic, Louise, Catherine, Will and Oliver. They are ages 6, 4, 4, 2 and 9 months respectively. I happen to care about them a great deal.

If you were me, you would, too.

My nieces and nephews are truly children of the 21st Century. They will see the legacy of the environmental policies we enact...right now. They will also live to see the legacy of all that we don't do, as well.

We don't have time for a "gas tax holiday." We all know that's true. It's bad policy, it's DOA in Congress and it sends exactly the wrong message to the voters about future legislation we need to pass on energy and our environment. But, let me be clear, we have even less time for the politics implicit in a "gas tax holiday." And the reality of that, the political games being played by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their surrogates have only reconfirmed my opposition to the campaign of Hillary Clinton for President.

Let me explain...

We are in the midst of choosing a nominee for the Democratic Party who, if elected, would serve as President from the years 2009-2013.

You read that right, we are electing a president for the years after most science fiction stories we grew up with were set. We're talking beyond the Terminator and Beyond the Thunderdome.

And, yes, I have a problem thinking that Hillary Clinton, a candidate shaped by the 1992 Presidential election and the Health Care failure of 1994, and John McCain a candidate whose career was shaped by the Savings in Loan crisis and the Keating Five, represent anything other than more of the same.

In fact, given the Gas Tax Gimmick that both of them are promoting, I tend to agree with John Edwards, if you want the status quo, Hillary Clinton is your candidate.

There's a problem with that...we don't have time to waste.

With the Clinton-McCain gas tax Gimmick, Hillary Clinton and John McCain have clearly and unequivocally passed the Panderer-in-Chief Threshold.

What is the Panderer-in-Chief Threshold?

It's simple.

Some candidates will propose solutions that aren't solutions, quick fixes that fix nothing, poll-driven policies that placate voters but do little else. Essentially, pander policies offer a helping hand that does little more than hurt all of us in the long run.

Take the Gas Holiday. This is a pander policy that Clinton and McCain both support and Barack Obama does not. ABC news notes that the experts all say Obama is essentially right on this issue. Obama says the Gas Holiday is simply not honest, that it is typical of how Washington works.

Clearly, Barack Obama does not meet the Panderer-in-Chief Threshold...

I want to say right off the bat that I got it wrong in my last diary. I wrote that diary in anticipation of three major public addresses by Rev. Wright: the Bill Moyers interview, the NAACP Keynote and the National Press Club speech.

Where I thought that Wright might use those venues to communicate with a broader public in a way that worked to get past the divisiveness and controversies surrounding some of what we had learned about his preaching in worship service, I completely misjudged what was to come.

Yes, we've learned some valuable context about Rev. Wright and his life and worldview over the last five days, during the Moyers interview in particular; we've also learned that given the chance to educate a broader public and clarify his views on the national stage, Reverend Wright instead went the opposite direction and chose a divisive rhetoric that was roundly destructive and enormously self-centered...

I think this quote from Hillary Clinton deserves more examination than it has received in the press:

I have to say that, you know, for Pastor Wright to have given his first sermon after 9/11 and to have blamed the United States for the attack, which happened in my city of New York, would have been just intolerable for me. And, therefore, I would have not been able to stay in the church.

And maybe it's, you know, just, again, a personal reflection that, regardless of whatever good is going on, and I have no reason to doubt that a lot of good things were happening in that church.

You get to choose your pastor. You don't choose your family, but you get to choose your pastor. And when asked a direct question, I said I would not have stayed in the church.

This diary is an invitation to think about that quote from the Pennsylvania debate.

I'd like to write tonight with a message of hope and a challenge to take action.

I've got a couple things to say right off the bat.

Congratulations to Hillary Clinton and her excellent supporters for their victory in Pennsylvania today.

I know some folks are tempted to blame the voters when things don't go their way. I'm not for that. I happen to like voting; considering the alternatives, I'll take an election any day.

But I do have some thoughts that I'd like to share with you tonight...

I was sitting taking a break from phonebanking for Barack Obama today and had a great conversation with Fred Feller, a recently elected national delegate for Obama from CA-09.

Fred won election to go to Denver here in CA-09 last Sunday at a caucus held at Beebe Memorial Church on Telegraph Avenue about a mile from my house in Oakland.

970 of us showed up to vote in that caucus last Sunday. I was a volunteer working the line...giving out information and making sure things ran smoothly...and so I had the chance to speak with almost every last one of those voters.

Fred won enough votes to be an Obama delegate to Denver. Like the other delegates chosen, he will do Obama proud, and I was really pleased to see him taking his Saturday afternoon to call Pennsylvania with about thirty other volunteers at the campaign offices of Congresswoman Barbara Lee...

I've gotten some pushback on two of my most recent diaries suggesting that I'm saying two contradictory things:

First, I argued that Clinton's excellent supporters and activists will come around to vote for the nominee, but that Senator Clinton herself is in the driver's seat about how and when that happens and that creates a dilemma for our party.

Second, in my last diary, I indicated that I was growing increasingly frustrated with the melding of Clinton's tactics with GOP attacks on Barack Obama. Clinton's attacks these last two weeks have been moving in the direction of being more divisive and destructive to Obama and our party as a whole. This has hardly been a moment to "chill out" as Bill Clinton cheerily advised activists at the CDP convention in San Jose; in fact, with the latest Clinton attacks mirroring GOP attacks on Gore and Kerry, this has been, in my estimation, one of the most destructive weeks for the Democratic Party in recent memory.

Hillary Clinton has used this moment to tear apart the Democratic Party in her attempt to tear down Barack Obama.

I don't think we should let her.

It shouldn't take a historian to remember that the corporate media, led by Rupert Murdoch's FOX News and abetted by writers at supposedly liberal outposts like the New York Times and the Washington Post, joined the Republican Party in branding Al Gore and John Kerry as "out of touch elitists."

Now, it didn't matter what Gore or Kerry actually said, or did, or what their policies were, the Republican party and the Corporate media have collaborated for years on this kind of misleading characterization.

The Republican party, the party that coddles big companies that ship our jobs overseas, the party that destroys our environment by stripping regulations of their teeth, the party that gives deep tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans while leaving our kids saddled with debt, the party of trade deals that screw the little guy in Akron and in Bogota, the party of the war in Iraq, is, per these same media types, the party of the all-American guy you'd like to go to a barbeque with.

Democrats are "latte-sipping liberals" who wear "earth tones" and are "out of touch."

It doesn't matter if that's true or not.

With so much claptrap, hoo-haw and innuendo being slung around by the mainstream media and on the blogs it's easy to forget some of the basic realities that underly this primary season. Here's one of them.

The only reason in April of 2008 that this is not currently a Clinton vs. McCain presidential contest is that millions upon millions of voters have chosen to cast their lot with Senator Barack Obama.

Why have these millions of voters chosen Obama?

It has nothing to do him being a "sure thing" in November and even less to do with negative opinions people have about either of his formidable opponents. People vote for Obama, because, as we've learned from Iowa forward, voters understand that Barack Obama represents a powerful opportunity for our country. Obama's candidacy represents the potential for unifying our self-interest as voters with our national aspirations as Americans. No other candidate provides this in one package.

Within the Democratic Party, more and more delegates agree with every passing day, that the opportunity expressed in the candidacy of Barack Obama is our best choice for the nomination and the best choice for America in 2008...

Last Sunday before Bill Clinton took the stage at the California Democratic Convention I stood on the left side of floor in the midst of the 200+ strong pod of Clinton supporters waiting for Bill to arrive.

The Clinton sign-toters formed a diverse, well-scrubbed group of delegates notable for how many folks had brought their teen-aged children in tow. The impression you got was that these were life-long party activists who were passing a tradition along to their kids. If anything struck me demographically, it was that the Clinton delegates had a vaguely suburban vibe.

When Bill did take the stage something remarkable happened. In unison, the Hillary signs went up and the Clinton delegates strode in formation towards the podium with an ease and confidence of long practice.

I thought to myself, these folks aren't new at this. They've done this before. In fact, looking at the assembled sign-toters something struck me for the first time, Hillary's supporters know conventions.

I bet her supporters in San Jose included many who'd been to national conventions before.

This weekend thanks to Art Torres and Crystal Strait and the internet outreach team of the California Democratic party (thanks Matt and Penny!) I joined a crew of local California bloggers from up and down the state at the California Democratic Party Convention in San Jose.

I have a really simple message to convey from that convention (which was ably covered among other places at the local California blog Calitics.)

Despite what the media and a false impression on the blogs might tell you, in 2008 we Democrats are in this together. Not only do we know how to get along but we can do so with respect for our array of identities and backgrounds and our diversity of viewpoints.

This is a diary that's more like...a diary, if you know what I mean.

Today was a significant day in the Democratic contest for the presidential nomination. I learned something important today about Senator Clinton. And I learned something today about the state of the Democratic Party that I'd like to share with you.

Let me explain...

This is a very simple diary.

The proper response to a 'first-time diarist' talking about how "worried they are" about the Democratic Party is not to talk about their "worries" or the Democratic Party. The proper response to a 'first-time diarist' talking about how "worried they are" about the Democratic Party is to talk about John McCain and the GOP.

In that light, here are Twenty Thoughts about John McCain...