Great post. Exactly what I have been thinking. I would rather have seen Edwards or someone else with the nomination.

Nathan,

I've always felt confounded by Democratic moderates and pragmatists who insist on a campaign that is economically moderate to conservative because that's the best way to reach swing voters, when most of what I have read about red state America suggests they can be won by a economic populist as with a moderate to conservative position on abortion.

I'm not in favor of the Dems doing that. But if the goal is moderating the party's position to appeal to moderate or conservative voters why do they only discuss moderating the party's economic positions, but few of its other positions?

great post again..Clinton did nothing to stem the erosion of real wages for those who work for a living. Perhaps the only difference between the democrats and the republicans is the sort of social agenda that some liberals cling to. Although I would hope that the democrats will not be quite so hostile to continuing social security as the Norquist stalinists are.

This is a long post--sorry. But I think anyone elected will have difficulty undoing the damage. We didn't get here over night or even in the past decade. How do you restore balance to the federal court of appeals, for example, after 30 years of steadily loading the bench with individuals trained to undermine labor, antitrust and other laws that attempt to balance the competing interests of human society and corporate entities?

So-called moral and small-government concerns have always provided cover for economic interests. They are not separate. Ultimately, it's all about culture. There will always be folks who would be most comfortable in an oligarchy of plutocrats. It's comforting to imagine that material success is the reward of virtue, and that the less successful must therefore be less virtuous perhaps even...baaaaad. That lets folks with cinders for hearts off the hook.

Such human limitations and the resulting interests, compulsions end up defining politics. That's where economic politics and the politics of religion meet today, where they've always met. So for me that's a culture war and it's been going on in this country from day 1. So ignoring to the economic war is not dealing with culture either. We have to own up to it for starters.

Not caring about the economic war leads to not caring about a lot of other stuff that happens to people we're not likely to run into at Starbucks--and to maybe a lot more who just work in the next cube. Moreover, history shows us that there are always plenty of folks who can cross the line between reasonable means to an end and any means or cost at all in a heartbeat. Society/government--the point of the social contract--is in part to moderate that tendency.

I think we are facing that consequence now in Iraq--and its foundations are a lot broader than 9/11.

So how exactly do we start retooling our current society so that how we got to Iraq and what been going on there will be less likely to occur again in the future? How do we even pull back from it, having come so far? It's going to take way more than the efforts of a Kerry, an Edwards or anyone else to fix the mess.

That's why dealing with the economic issues is ultimately so important--why the work of the few unions that are left, for example, must be paid attention to and supported. Caring about the welfare and quality of life of our neighbors and expressing that care in the way we regulate our relations through governnment is the first step back toward sanity.

Kumar,

Don't take the DLC types at face value when they give us that "we wish we didn't have to move to the right, but we need to in order to win elections" rap. I personally think that the DLC actually believes its center-right ideology -- not as a matter of political expediency (though they do see it that way, too) but as a matter of public policy. All the right wing Dems out there, from Joe "they didn't apologize to our goons" Lieberman to Evan Bayh to any number of Southerners really believe in free market capitalism. I think they really like rich capitalists and think they're our friends. And they certainly like American military hegemony. Now, they might sell DLCism as a tactic, even if it's failed miserably over the years, but in their hearts I really think they are more afraid of "socialism" than a corporate oligarchy.

my problem isn't the republicans... it is the lack of a viable choice because the dems have also become a party of the corporations. dems are just a little bit better than repubs at hiding it.

mostly it seems that BOTH repubs and dems are happy to limit the discussion to the culture wars because that keeps the economic class wars out of sight.

"Silence of the media", my ass. They've been very complicit in how things got this way. Look up the market cap of Time Warner, or GE/NBC, for example.

It's all about the new middle class having taken over the Democratic Party. No surprise that folks like Yglesias, Drum and DeLong are only interested in the culture wars.

I largely agree with you -- I just wish you wouldn't blame Mr. Rubin. The House holds the power of the purse, and ultimately it's legislative control and the hearts of legislative Dems where this battle must be fought.

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