Well, if you're curious where Petey's been for the past week, he was banned from posting. No explanation given, an email to Kos unreplied to. But the site is Markos' private property, and he can do as he pleases. If I had his agendas and his sources of funding, I'm not sure I'd want me around either.
I was back for a month, and it was fun to spend the primary season with you. Thanks to all who were sympathetic to me. And thanks to those who completely disagreed with me, but still were willing to engage in open discourse on the things we all care about. Perhaps we shall meet again someday.
Sorry, if some people found Petey too caustic for their tastes, but judging from the large number of other regularly intemperate posters on the site, the only problem seems to be that Petey was caustic from a different point of view than the general consensus. Had we spent the general election campaign together fighting on the same side, I'd bet most would have found my caustic snark quite congenial and comfortable.
In case there's any lingering confusion as to where I've been coming from, let me try to explain myself.
When the lefty blogosphere began to arise, I was as excited as many of you. I saw it as a possible balance to righty talk radio, albeit with a much smaller potential audience. Little did I imagine it would be hijacked by a Presidential campaign with bad motives.
I probably wouldn't have supported Howard Dean under any circumstances. I normally search for a Presidential candidate who achieves a balance of lefty policy and mass electoral appeal. Dean had an incredibly unappetizing combination of centrist policy with awful electoral appeal. In short, he was an almost unbelievably horrible candidate, and I was afraid this would only become apparant after he'd gotten the nomination, instead of before. But this does not even begin to explain my antipathy toward the Dean campaign.
Dean and Trippi made a deliberate and cynical decision to exploit disappointment over the Democratic lack of power in Washington. Instead of attacking extremist Republican tactics, they decided to create a myth of a Democratic Party that had been betrayed by its leadership. They made a craven decision to attack Democrats in an attempt to divide the Party so they could mau-mau the rank and file into giving them the nomination.
To my mind, dividing the left is the greatest sin imaginable. The right enjoys such advantages from its alliance with capital that the left must remain united to compete. Dean and Trippi knew full well the myth they were creating was wrong. They also knew full well, but did not care, that they were creating lasting divisions in the Party with their focus on short-term selfish political gain.
Burlington has done damage to the Party by creating false divisions and resentments. They have done damage to the left by damaging the Party. And they have badly damaged the potential of the lefty blogosphere by hijacking it for their own ends, and cynically creating and exploiting false myths about the Democratic Party in blogosphere activists.
And the sad thing is that none of this was necessary. Dean would have been able to build his money network just as easily without training his fire inside the Party. If he had done it that way, not only would he have avoided creating all the scar tissue he's managed to create, but he just might have won the nomination .
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Kos can silence my voice from these pages. I'm sure he thinks his financial future is rosier if he maintains ideological purity around here. On first glance, it seems easier to market a groupthink. Given Kos's previous record, I'm surprised he let me post for this past month.
But as long as the lefty blogosphere sees as their enemy the rank and file Democrats who so greatly outnumber them, they will consign themselves to eternal irrelevance. This is the greatest negative fallout from the Dean campaign by far, and is why I think that campaign has so very badly served the interests of its fervent followers.
The lefty blogosphere should be about stregthening the Party, not about taking a wrecking ball to the Party in some Khmer Rouge-esque dream of destroying it to build a more utopian party in its place. And strengthening the Party was just what the blogosphere had started doing before Howard Dean hijacked it with the message that anyone who didn't support Howard Dean was actually a Republican.
The Democratic Party is not dKos. The Democratic Party is not even the blogosphere. The Party is so much larger and broader than many here imagine, and it covers so much more ideological and sociological ground. It stretches from Bernie Saunders to Max Baucus, from Gavin Newsom to Richard Daley, from Jesse Jackson to Harold Ford, from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton, from anti-war to saving Social Security, from raising small totals of clean money to raising big totals of dirty money. And keeping all of these contradictions under the same big tent is the only way we get to 51%.
Cheers and farewell. Keep your eyes on the prize. Remember that bringing progressive change in this country almost always comes through the structure of the Democratic Party. Remember that stopping reactionary change in this country almost always comes through the structure of the Democratic Party. Making the Party stronger without chasing out those who've spent a lifetime building it up is how we can accomplish any of our goals.
-Petey
PS Go John Edwards!