Wishing And Hoping

From MSNBC:

"If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere."

Howard Fineman, who wrote this article, pursues a theme that has been written about before. That theme is as follows: the Democrat base is far angrier and more passionate than the Democratic leadership. The heart of the Democrat party now lies with Michael "Osama Bin Laden killed the wrong Americans" Moore, Cindy "this country isn't worth fighting for" Sheehan, and Howard "we won't always have the strongest military" Dean.

The traditional base --labor, African-Americans, young professional women who vote single issue (abortion rights)-- will not deliver the nomination. Instead, the successful candidate must figure out a way to appeal to the blogger activists who demand something radically new and different from the Party.

Perhaps this is true. No one will win the Democrat Party's nomination unless he or she first wins over the Democratic Underground. Honestly, I hope it IS true because it seems quite obvious, clear and incontrovertible that anyone who appeals to this new base will not and cannot win in the general election. The Democrats' activist bloggers may want revolution but that doesn't mean the rest of us do.

I am not a political soothsayer, I don't know what the world will look like in 3 years and a lot of things could happen. And I know that a candidate always plays to his base in the primaries and runs to the center in the general.

But if Fineman's thesis holds up, the successful Democrat nominee would have to run SO far left in the primaries, would have to say and do so many bizarre and irrational things (all of which would be captured on video), that there is no way he or she could regain the middle without having all those things replayed constantly in political attack ads by the Republican opponent who would have to appear only relatively sane in comparison.

I suppose the real point is that the nominee would have to figure out a way to win this radical base over without blowing his or her chances in the general election. This would take a fiendishly clever person, someone who can talk in code convincingly without providing any ammunition to be used by the other side later and hope that the rest of us just won't get it.

But that's the problem isn't it? The radical left doesn't just want to think you're with them, they're going to want to know it.