Is Broder on Crack?

I'm not the biggest Broder basher in the world. I don't think he's an ideologue, simply an inside the beltway pundit in thrall to conventional wisdom and generalities.

Both flavors of bullshit are on display in his Washington Post op-ed Two Visions of America. All in the service of creating a sophmoric "compare and contrast" essay he fudges the essential facts. He still thinks Democrats want to wage the campaign on domestic issues, like they did in the 2002 Congressional campaigns. Like with this howler:

The leading Democratic candidates -- Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- believe Bush deserves defeat, not because they differ with his handling of postwar Iraq but because, as Edwards puts it, his domestic policies have separated America into two nations, with the privileged and prosperous on one side and the struggling majority of families on the other.

I mean, what planet is this guy on? The primary  rationale for Clark's candidacy is to confront the Bush Administration's disastrous foreign policy, especially post- (and pre-) war Iraq. Kerry is already sounding themes in a Democratic primary that "Democrats know far better than Pres. Bush how to keep America safe." And Dean vaulted to the front runner position based on a strident and forceful critique of the whole Iraq debacle.

And journalists wonder why more than half of the country doesn't trust their judgment. It's because they insist on constructing fictitious narratives on which to base their empty ruminations.