"Shut up," He explained.

Lanny Davis: Hey, we'll only have show trials for people with the temerity to fight back!

He reminds me of the little boy caught fighting by his mother, "It all started when Timmy hit me back!"

George Putnam has Died

Things I didn't know about George Putnam:

"I detest labels," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "I've been called many things in my career: right-wing extremist, super-patriot, goose-stepping nationalist, jingoistic SOB. And those are some of the nice things.

"But those people have never bothered to determine my background: Farmer-Labor Party, Socialist Party, lifelong member of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], member of the Urban League. I went through the Depression, and my father was reduced to selling peanuts door-to-door . . . I fell in love with Franklin D. Roosevelt. I've been a lifelong Democrat. I'm a conservative Democrat."

Sorry. My head will stop spinning in just a minute.

It's Okay to Laugh at Him

With the possibility of an Obama victory in the offing, John Stewart starts aiming at the Democratic candidate.



Two points:

1) Jim Treacher is funnier than me:

That’s my favorite part, the nervous, hesitant laughter. You can almost hear the audience thinking, “Is this okay? Will people think I’m a racist?”

2) Democrats are kicking up a dust cloud when they say, "Changing circumstances required Obama to change his mind."

Really?

When Obama made his pledge he knew that if he won the primary that he would face the winner of the Republican party. What changed there? Did he think that McCain is just a big meanie and that he would have kept his pledge if Fred Thompson was the Republican candidate? Mike Huckabee?

What has changed since then? Money. Lots and lots of money.

Like the old joke goes, "We've established what you are, my dear. We are now haggling price."

Racial McCarthyism?

Via Protein Wisdom:

The press, particularly ABC and Fox, have been very irresponsible regarding Reverend Wright. He has been used as a tool to smear Obama with the association; I think the apt label would be “Racial McCarthyism.”

In this formulation, that makes The Reverend Jeremiah Wright into Joseph Stalin.

Hmmmm...

Identity -Politics Hand-Grenades

This whole Democratic primary campaign has spun out of control.

From Mark Steyn, via National Review:

...Senator Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert wielders of identity-politics hand-grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist,” who isn’t?

Change! Can You Spare Some?

The People's Cube Has this great Obama graphic.

One of the great things about teh internets is that we no longer have to settle for 12-generation xerographic copies of great visual jokes. We get to see the original.

Debates?

Anyone who understands the meaning of the word debate knows that what are heralded as "Candidate's Debates" are anything but. They are really more of a joint press conference where the point isn't to exchange ideas or test ideas against one another, but to provide a pulpit for a recital of sound bites and stump-speech homilies to the media. (Any real give-and-take occurs later in the spin rooms.)

This Monday, the Democratic Party is holding a debate with the most foolish of premises: that one-shot questions from average folks will penetrate the hard shells of candidate's handlers, PR flacks and advisers, and will actually provoke them to say something honest and unguarded.

Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit, has submitted his hard-hitting, no-holds-barred question. In fact, he's zeroed in on what's been keeping me awake at nights as I contemplate the question "Who will next steer this mighty ship of state?"

Holy Smokes!

Here they are, the Wholey Trinity of Democratic front-runners, Barak, Hillary!, and John.

"Polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans believe the Democrats to be less friendly to faith than they had been even a few years ago. Yet a donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles "How the Democrats Got Religion." From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is "a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party." --Wall Street Journal

Is this the end of the Republican lock on Evangelicals?

"Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in a speech, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now."

I guess not. Republicans have been, for the last 20 years, the party beneath an ever-growing tent. This has lead to some of the current fractious (yet healthy) debate over the priority of issues in the public arena. Is the Global War on Terror the top priority, or is it immigration? Or are these two sides of the same coin? What about health care? Medical insurers, threat or menace?

But the Democratic party has one hell of a donnybrook coming when the increasingly-militant secularists start to wrestle with people of faith for control of the party.

Bring popcorn. A circus is not the same without popcorn.

Curses! He Gets It!

A level-headed internet voice on the political left? Great Scot! This could cause a rupture in the space-time continuum!

The blogger bomb-throwing may be good for inflaming the activist base, and, as they demonstrated in the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut, for occasionally blowing up the opposition. It’s not bad for bullying your friends, either, as the liberal blogosphere did last week in pressuring Edwards to not fire the two bloggers who penned the offensive anti-religious posts.

But the typical blog mix of insults and incitements is just not an effective strategy for persuading people outside of your circle of belief – be they moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, or the swelling number of independents – to join your cause. In fact, it’s far more likely to alienate than propagate them.

Something else most liberal bloggers fail to appreciate – we as Democrats can’t afford to repel those middle of the road, largely non-partisan voters.

The Iraq war notwithstanding, which has temporarily tilted the political landscape in our favor, the long-term electoral math is stacked against us – surveys show conservatives currently outnumber liberals three-to-two. Thus, if we want to win the White House and become a majority party again, it’s not enough to excite our base. We must also expand it.

One sure way to do the opposite, and consign our party to minority status, is to broadly tar Christians in general and Catholics in particular as “Christo-fascists” and misogynists, as the Edwards bloggers did.

Catholics are one of the biggest and most important swing-voting blocs in this country. They often tend to decide elections. So it’s probably not the smartest idea for a leading Democratic presidential candidate to hire people who openly defame Catholicism’s sacred figures by talking about the Lord filling the Virgin Mary with “his hot, white, sticky spirit.”

That so many leading bloggers could not see or acknowledge that point suggests at a minimum a giant blind spot on their part – after all, these guys are the first to protest the notion that Democrats are in any way hostile to religion and denounce it as a conservative canard.

But more than likely it just indicates that these bloggers didn’t see anything wrong with the bigoted rants of their peers – and that the far left’s disdain for people of faith is not only alive and well, but has gone digital.

Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership recognize this religion problem is real, and much to their credit, they have made it a priority to reach out to faith-based voters over the last few years and show them that they are welcome in the Democratic fold.

One has to wonder what they thought as they watched their blogger wards, whom they have lately been favoring with public praise and special access, trample the godly garden they have been trying to re-seed.

In the long run, the only way to prevent embarrassments like this from escalating and causing greater damage – and more importantly, to fulfill the rich potential of the blogosphere as a persuasion and organizing tool – is for the voices of reason within the Netroots to stand up to the smack down artists and prod their peers to trade their juvenile accusations for mature arguments.

Don't listen to that man! LA LA LA LA LA!

Democrats just don't understand that many people, Libertarians and Republicans, were driven from the Democratic party in the the last 40 years.

Every time I hear Democrats gassing on about their "faith" I remember all of the insults that Christians have endured from their fair-haired children and I just say, "You lost me there, Skippy."

For a good example of what I'm talking about, check out the comments to the linked article. Nasty, nasty.

Reaping the Nutroots

There is something perversely satisfying about this video of Washington State Senator Patty Murray being heckled, harassed, and served with an "arrest warrant" by antiwar activists.

It reminds me of this quote from A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now:

“New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics comes to an end....Whoever embraces New Anger is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression.”

Calling Patty Murray a war criminal pretty much embodies this concept. But the fact that she and her colleagues played to these people and used these people during their political campaigns is sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

Like my Mama always says, "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas."

Crying in New Hampshire

The Washington Post has an article by Harold Meyerson drawing yet another parallel between the election of 1972 and 2008. Even I, who have been drawing many parallels between the anti-war movements of the 1960s and the 2000s had not gotten to that point.

A specter was haunting Hillary Clinton as she campaigned in New Hampshire this weekend: the specter of Ed Muskie.

As the ancient or merely studious among us will recall, the Democratic senator from Maine, who'd been Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, entered his party's presidential contest in 1972 as the front-runner. His prospects were dashed in the New Hampshire snows, however. As popular memory has it, an indignant Muskie started crying while refuting a silly attack on him (though whether he was genuinely upset or merely sniffling during a frigid outdoor news conference was never authoritatively resolved). Muskie's more serious problem, however, was the Vietnam War, which he opposed.

His opposition, though, had none of the fervor or long-term consistency of another Democratic senator and presidential aspirant, George McGovern. By 1972, seven years had elapsed since the United States had sent ground forces to Vietnam, and Richard Nixon, through his invasion of Cambodia and stepped-up bombing campaigns, had made clear that the road to de-escalation would entail periodic escalations, at least as long as he was president. The Democratic base was in no mood for temporizing on Vietnam.

Party voters wanted out, and they wanted a nominee who'd been right on the war (almost) from the start: McGovern. Sic transit gloria Muskie.

Today, Hillary Clinton seems almost uncannily positioned to become the Ed Muskie of 2008. She opposes the U.S. military presence in Iraq but not with the specificity, fervor or bona fides of her leading Democratic rivals. As Muskie did with Vietnam, she supported the legislation enabling the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and she has been slower and more inconstant than her party rivals in coming around to opposing the continued U.S. occupation.

Mr. Meyerson does note two differences:

Entering the race, Clinton has institutional advantages that Muskie could scarcely have dreamed of -- an unparalleled network of financial and political supporters, a universal level of public recognition. But, like Muskie, she is out of sync with her party's -- to some extent, her country's -- voters on the major issue of the day...

Indeed, so strong is support for a withdrawal that Edwards and Obama would by no means face the general election wipeout that was McGovern's fate. (Besides, Nixon ran against the antiwar movement and the fomenters of social tumult. Today, while opposition to the war is widespread, there isn't really an antiwar movement -- not one resembling what emerged in the '60s, anyway -- for hawks or Republicans to run against.)

So far, so good. But Mr Meyerson then runs off the rails with:

And should Americans still be fighting and dying in Iraq when the next election rolls around, the Democrats probably could win with Dennis Kucinich as their nominee.

Sorry. That was a bridge too far.

Edwards and the Christian Left

Following up to my previous post about the Edward's campaign's misstep:

Apparently the affair has upset some on the Christian Left. I really feel for these people--especially those that have been laboring for years in the fields of social justice.

"We're completely invisible to this debate," said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign's response. "As a constituency, the Christian left isn't taken all that seriously," Penalver said.

"We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back," said Brian O'Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader who chairs the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, a Democratic Party group. O'Dwyer said Edwards should have fired the bloggers. "It's not only wrong morally – it's stupid politically."

...O'Dwyer e-mailed a statement to reporters saying: "Senator Edwards is condoning bigotry by keeping the two bloggers on his staff. Playing to the cheap seats with anti-Catholic bigotry has no place in the Democratic Party."

The Christian Left has led the way for many years in the Democratic Party, some are alive today that spoke up and stood up and marched in the 1950s and 1960s civil-rights era. Hated and vilified by the Dixiecrats, they stuck to their beliefs and were vindicated when the nation had a change of heart. They have been a conscience to the party (and at the best of times to the entire country.)

And now some nasty little haters have stepped in and not only taken a high place at the table, but taken it after shouting that the Religious have no real place at the table.

I do disagree with much of the Christian Left and I speak out when I feel that they are missing the mark. But I am glad that they do not seemed to be disheartened. We need their voices, now more than ever, on the other side of the aisle.

Second Big Primary Gaffe

I was surprised when some low-level yutz in the Washington State Democratic Party decided that Christians weren't a constituency worth worrying about. But at least the Dem Pols at the state level have the decency to be ashamed. But when a National Candidate blows it...

I assume that the Constant Reader has been hearing about John Edward's campaign retaining the blogging services of Amanda Marcotte (Pandragon) and Melissa McEwan (Shakespeare's Sister).

This whole thing has been examined and dissected on many, many sites. The latest word from the Edward campaign site is that John Edwards has made the decision to keep them:

The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.

Two points:

First, this is a piece of doubletalk.

• Writing, "...that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign..." and in the next sentence tolerating it.
• Writing, "I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word," and ignoring the plain language of their previous writing.
• Writing, "...I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake," at though this was an unfortunate one-time outburst, instead of an on-going trashing of Christians ("godbags").

At the national level, politicians know that all they have is their public image. There is no way that they can connect personally with even 1% of the voters that they need. So politicians craft a public persona that represents what they want to communicate to the voters whom they cannot meet.

Senator Bob Dole was terrible at his public persona. His speeches always oscillated between sounding like the grouchy old man down the block that yelled at the kids to get off his lawn and a kind of plaintive whine that Bill Clinton was getting a free pass, "Where's the outrage?"

When the election was over, he appeared on some talk shows and was very personable and funny--but you would never have know that from his persona.

Hillary Clinton is the current champion at crafting a campaign persona. In fact, she's so good that she runs the risk of having the press make the crafting of her persona the story of the campaign, rather than the melodrama of the Pioneer Who Became the First Woman President.

But Edwards has followed Joe Biden in starting his campaign with a gaffe. If Edwards had fired his blogmasters, he would have alienated his netroots activists; but by keeping them he chances alienating "people of faith" (i.e. devout Catholics and Protestants) as well as anybody to the left of Ralph Nader that's feeling touchy. Edwards has got to be thinking, "It's activists who win you the primary." So what's the breakdown?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Category: Unoffended, agree with Marcotte's views.
Action: Will applaud keeping them. Become more motivated.
Comment: This is the payoff group. Corral these ponies into pulling the bandwagon.
Result: Score!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Category: Offended, but believe that Edwards best represents their agenda.
Action: Hold nose and vote for Edwards anyway.
Comment: His core group.
Result: Score!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Category: Offended, Catholics and Protestants
Action: Won't vote for Edwards
Comment: Were going to vote for Obama anyway.
Result: No fault--no foul!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Second, I am glad that Edwards has kept Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. As Senator Edwards says:

We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.

This is true. We need a debate, an airing of views and opinions. We need discipline, focus, and courage. We cannot allow that debate to be hijacked by the candidate's personae. We need to look at the people in the team the candidate assembles to craft their message so that we can properly judge the candidate.

If I had said this kind of stuff in my workplace, I would be out the door. If I had written a blog with this kind of stuff and it became known to my employer's customers, I would be out the door. And I'm not trying to sell an image of myself as my main product.

These two women were hired on the basis of what they were: active bloggers.

The weaselly non-apologies offered by the Marcotte and McEwan are completely pathetic:

"It has never been my intention to disparage people's individual faith, and I'm sorry if my words were taken in that way," McEwen's statement said.

It's not her fault if you can't get the joke.

But thanks for keeping them Senator. You have made the decision about whether to vote for you in the general election easy. You (or rather, your blogmasters) have pre-written a huge chunk of you opponents oppo-research.

Obama Fever! Catch it at Church!

I, for one, welcome our Democratic Overlords:

WASHINGTON — Famed pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren on Wednesday defended his invitation to Sen. Barack Obama to speak at his church despite objections from some evangelicals who oppose the Democrat's support for abortion rights.

Obama is one of nearly 60 speakers scheduled to address the second annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church beginning Thursday at Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

But seriously, folks, the idea of inviting Barack Obama to speak to Conservative Evangelicals is a great one. It allows those Evangelicals to see the man and verify that he doesn't have horns or a bifurcate tail. It allows Obama to receive feedback from a conservative crowd, which is much better for us all than for him to be stuck in the Liberal echo chamber.

The end result may be a contribution to the moderating effect in national politics.

Speaking of Obama, a great observation on This Week with George was the two possible effects of Barack Obama on the Hillary! primary campaign:

• It's terrible! He preempts Hillary's tack to the social center!
• It's wonderful! he's sucking all the oxygen from the room, snuffing out lesser lights!

I tend to go with the second of these perceptions, hence my prediction of a Hillary/Obama ticket.

Who Will Run in '08? Part II

Rich Lowry at National Review Online has a column on Barack Obama as the Anti-Hillary:

...After all this [hate for the names Clinton and Bush], who doesn’t hunger for a clean break? Thus the energy behind the possible presidential bid of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement. And that is because everything about him says, “I’m not a Bush, I’m not a Clinton, and can we please talk about something else?”

It will be manifestly good for the country if it elects a president in 2008 who doesn’t elicit yowling hatred from the other side...

Hillary would have formidable assets in a 2008 race, but the timing could be against her. Maybe it’s too soon for another Clinton in presidential politics. On the Republican side, the most talented and accomplished Republican officeholder in the country, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is sitting ’08 out precisely because of the baggage that currently attaches to his last name.

At the moment, nothing but sweetness and light attach to the last name Obama. Skeptics note that he is a creation of the media, as if this speaks badly of him. Most politicians would spend millions and go through every exertion to be so created by the media. The more serious, related objection is that Obama has no record of accomplishment during his two-year stint in the Senate. There’s a political trade-off here, though. By the time he does anything in the Senate, he will probably be thoroughly acclimated to the institution, making him just as unappealing as the dozen other senators who consider running for president every four years.

The genius of Obama is that he has a pure liberal voting record — a 100 percent rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in 2005 — at the same time he appeals to independents and avoids seeming noxiously partisan. No doubt, some of this sheen will be lost the day he were to announce for president. But it also reflects something real. Obama is willing to say that Republicans are wrong, not evil — a very basic concession that nonetheless takes some bravery in the blog-besotted fever swamp that is much of the left right now. He has shown that he can speak the language of religious believers in a non-focus-group-tested, genuine way. And he has charisma, an invaluable asset that can’t be bought or faked.

So, Obama looks good. But in my estimation he looks good for a failed presidential try--which is not a bad thing. Even a failed primary campaign will give him national exposure and let him step up to the ultimate big league of politics. Everybody on the Democratic side has at least one failed primary campaign (Kerry and Edwards have a failed general campaign behind them) except for Hillary, who has lots of experience with her husband's campaigns.

So here is why I said what I said in my earlier post on this topic: Hillary has the experience and resources, while Obama has the "juice." If they could reach a modus vivendi they could link the reliable donors of the Democratic party to the excitement that, frankly, grim Hillary lacks.

Build Your Own Theocracy

In a previous post, I quoted Rick Garnet on the conservative conspiracy:

...he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.

This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics"

There is a very readable column in The Nation about Progressive Democrats trying to emulate this consarned, newfangled technique:

The time had come for the donors to think differently about how to spend their money, just as conservatives had done forty years earlier when they launched a counteroffensive against liberalism and pushed the Republican Party far to the right. The meeting was led by Rob Stein, a former official in the Clinton Administration, who'd spent the last year and a half developing a PowerPoint presentation vividly mapping the rise of the conservative movement. He'd convened the meeting to encourage progressives to emulate the conservative funders by investing in the "guts" of politics--leaders and ideas and institutions that would last beyond one election. A month later the Democracy Alliance officially came into existence, as an exclusive collective of donors and one of the progressive community's most ambitious undertakings yet.

So, are we a theocracy yet?

But, give them credit, Rob Stein and Ari Berman (the article's author) are aware that it's more than just the forms they need to find:

Almost two years along, the Alliance's 100 donors have distributed more than $50 million to center-left organizations and activists--a lot of money, yet still largely symbolic given the deep pockets of its members. Even as the donors pour millions into a new political infrastructure, however, problems have emerged that mirror many of the problems of the Democratic Party today and the progressive movement in general.

The first is determining what, exactly, the group stands for and wants to accomplish. Unlike the money guys who underwrote the right, members of the Alliance seem to lack strong ideological conviction about what the future ought to look like. And they do not have the militant perspective of outsiders eager to disrupt and overrun the party establishment. The right-wingers developed a core set of principles and stuck to them with an insurgent sense of persistence and aggressiveness. The wealthy liberals, in contrast, are still debating among themselves how to spend their money. Do Alliance members just want to be in the club or do they intend to change it? Do they want to stick with the party's stars--Bill and Hillary Clinton and their cadre of influential aides, who are preaching "moderation"--or are they ready to listen to new voices? Are they really committed, and prepared, to fund long-haul change?

So, is the Democrat's 2006 situation comparable to the Republicans back in 1964?

In 1964 the conservative wing grabbed the steering wheel of the Republican Party and swerved. They rejected the party's establishment and candidate (Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton ) and nominated Barry Goldwater. At the nominating convention, Nelson Rockefeller was booed when he tried to speak.

The conservative's reward? They took a monumental pasting in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in United States history. (Unmatched until Reagan swept 49 states in 1984.)

Conservatives saw that they were not connecting with the Main Street America. The institutions of communication (newspapers, radio and television) were either pro-Democratic or pro "Rockefeller" Republican.

So conservatives began to build the institutions that would allow them to speak to the American people. But they were not just trying to swing an election, they were communicating commonsense conservative ideas.

Of all the lessons from the right, the Alliance has forgotten arguably the most important: It takes both money and conviction to achieve victory. "It doesn't make sense to develop a strategy without a vision," says James Piereson, longtime executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which was one of the key half-dozen funders on the right. "It's a mistaken analogy that conservatives succeeded because of our tactics. I always thought conservatives were successful because of the ideas we were trying to sell."

The final, most difficult lesson that must be learned from the Conservatives is that you have to distance yourself from your crazies. From the late 1950's, William F. Buckley and the Conservatives started purging the party of Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and other extremist elements.

I don't think that the Democratic Party has the grit to show the Kos Kids and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists the door.

The "Come to Jesus" Story

Back in the late 1980s, there was a fascinating political indicator. It became very easy to tell which Republicans had presidential ambitions by listening to their "Come to Jesus" stories.

What I mean is, everybody on the Republican bench was going around Lions and Kiwanis meetings giving much the same old rubber-chicken speeches of yesteryear, but adding a section where they described the moment they had become "born again." It was startling to read transcripts of Bob Dole, Alexander Haig, and many more telling how they had (figuratively) walked down that sawdust trail.

Well, what is old in new again. John Kerry has trotted out his redemption story, and he's not alone:

Kerry is the third high-profile Democrat to give a reflective, deeply personal speech on religion and politics in recent weeks, following Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Robert P. Casey Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

The addresses fit into a broader effort by liberal religious groups and Democratic candidates to appeal to religiously motivated voters in November's midterm elections.

I welcome this new thread of discussion to American politics. I only hope that none of these men develop a facial tic from frantically winking to their secularist supporters.

Proximate Causes

The Constant Reader will know that I trace the decline of the Democratic Party to 1968. However, the recent crack-up of the party has a more proximate cause.

The declining trend in the Democratic Party from 1968 to 1998 forced a crisis. The result of that crisis was the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, the Republican gain in Congressional seats in 2002, and the re-election of G.W.B. over John Kerry in 2004. The trend led to the crisis; the crisis led into the crack-up.

So what were the trend, the crisis, and the crack-up?

The trend was the Democrats gradualy slipping from being the majority party. The crisis was the collapse of the Clinton Presidency. The crack-up was the descent of the left-wing of the Democratic Party into conspriacy theory paranoia.

David Limbaugh's new book, Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party, Mr. Limbaugh dissects the decline of the Democratic Party and discusses the trend, the crisis, and the crack-up. He is interviewed at National Review Online:

It's hard to pinpoint an exact date, but I think the party sold its soul during the Clinton years, when it circled the wagons around a felonious president instead of doing the honorable thing. It embraced, rather than repudiated, a thoroughly corrupt president in exchange for holding on to political power. It seems that the party's electoral successes were tied to Clinton's cult of personality. He was able to keep them afloat temporarily, but ultimately it was their dependence on him that sunk the Democrats.

Note: I am completely convinced that had Al Gore in 1999 made a "more in sorrow than in anger" speech where he distanced himself from Clinton's behavior while embracing Clintonian centrism, he would have taken the presidency by a 7-10 percent margin. His unqualified embracing of Clinton ("our greatest president") exposed his shallowness and opportunism.

The party is not about the centrism Clinton pretended to champion. It is about advancing a far-left agenda. Poll after poll reveals that liberalism is a minority position in this country today — not the equal portion of a 50/50 nation that liberals still pray it is. As I discuss in the closing pages of my book, even James Carville has virtually reconciled himself to the reality that for now, at least, the Democratic party is a minority party.

Herein lies the key to answering your question. The party's unmitigated angst is largely tied to its loss of power. It simply cannot abide having lost control of the legislative branch it ruthlessly dominated for four decades. But even more, it cannot accept consistently losing the executive branch, especially after Clinton's eight years gave them reason for such optimism. Their conviction of their majority status and their entitlement to the executive branch gave way to collective shock and disbelief after the 2000 election results. How could they possibly have lost given Clinton's reputed record of peace and prosperity?

The Democrats rejected the loss in 2000 and put the country through hell trying to manufacture reasons to discredit the results in Florida, and thus the national results. In the process, which I meticulously document, they further debased themselves. In their utter failure to steal the 2000 election and to vindicate themselves finally in 2004, they have become completely embittered. Today they are driven not by an alternative policy agenda, but on a singular, myopic hatred for George W. Bush. I have retraced the unfolding of these events, including highlights of their unforgivable behavior in 2000, not to refight old battles, but to provide some insight into what has driven this party to utter distraction and aimlessness when it comes to policy.

So what will the Democrats do in 2008? Could they possibly try to "run against Bush?" Well, it's said that generals always fight the last war. Democrats need to shake off the netroots and not run the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 over again.