Then again word from

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Then again, word from Missouri …

I was holding back, but dude?!?

“The vast majority of Democrats totally understand that Dems running in reddish states can’t have stereotypically liberal positions on hot-button social and cultural issues. I think everybody gets that.”

No, no, no. THEY DON’T GET THAT AT ALL.

“Reddish”? Dems don’t get that notion even when it comes to blood red states.

Come on. If Dems got it, the party would have never nominated Kerry, and Hillary would be consigned to the oblivion of a Senate committee chairmanship, at best.

In fact, I’m trying to conjure up any factual basis for thinking that the majority of Dems get that, let alone a “vast majority.”

I lived in Louisiana when Dukakis ran. I lived in Missouri when Kerry (his fricking lt. gov.!) ran. They were jokes. Not just unelectable. Jokes. Howard Dean? Another joke. Hillary? God help us.

Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is having these folks wrecking the top of the ballot again and again? It not just that those of us in red states have to endure GOP presidencies, just like you blue staters. But we get the shit kicked out of us up and down the ballot. It’s a disaster.

You tell me how it is that Dems managed to nominate two Massachusetts liberals for president during the greatest conservative movement in this country since–I don’t know–prohibition? It sure ain’t because a vast majority decided to accommodate the mood of the country.

With those two nominations as bookends to the last 18 years, I don’t think the problem is that reporters like Goldberg keep repeating the same old tired cliches. So long as the Dems keep living those tired old cliches, you’d have to become a novelist to write a different storyline. Don’t shoot the messenger.

I guess my rejoinder would be that it was a wooden and unoriginal version of the message.

But I’ll let TPM Reader ZR speak for me …

Josh –

Since you ask for other people’s responses to the Goldberg NYer story:

I was really glad to read your post, as i had exactly the same response to the story when I read it. It’s not that any of the stuff Goldberg talked about was untrue, or unimportant exactly, or even unfair to Democrats. (The concern, for instance, that moderate red-state candidates may be harmed by a more outspoken, anti-Bush party leadership strikes me as legitimate, and who knows how it’ll play out?) It’s just that, if you follow this stuff, the issues Goldberg focused on have been so completely hashed out already. It would be generous to call them conventional wisdom. What they are is something like a basic backdrop to the much more dynamic trends and “cross-cutting alliances”, as you say, which are actually taking place and might be worthy of attention.

The other thing is — and this goes beyond the shortcomings of this particular lame story —
I understand the NYer isn’t writing for a political-junkie, DC crowd.

But even so, the NYer consistently includes better journalism, across just about every other subject, than anyone else out there. So you’d like to think they’d have something to say about Washington that actually advances the ball conceptually, and helps readers understand politics in a fresh way. And I don’t think they’ve figured out how to do that.

Enjoying your site as always.

ZK

More soon.

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