Thomas B. Edsall, in New Republic, discusses the negative influence of liberal elites.

The Lieberman-Lamont primary is a study, writ small, in what has ailed the Democratic Party over the last few decades. Simply put, Democratic presidential primary electorates continue to be dominated by an upscale, socially (and culturally) liberal elite. Democrats must first win the approval of this elite before they can compete in the general election. It’s a trap that no Democrat other than Bill Clinton has found a way to escape, and Lamont’s victory shows why.

In a quick and dirty analysis of the difference between the Lamont and Lieberman voters based on income, education, and other demographic data from across Connecticut, Ken Strasma of Strategic Telemetry found that Lamont’s strongest support came from areas with high housing values, voters with college or graduate degrees, and parents with children in private schools. Lieberman’s votes, in contrast, came from the cities, renters, blue-collar and service-sector workers, and those receiving Social Security benefits.

There is nothing wrong with upscale liberals or downscale renters; a vote is a vote. The problem for the Democrats is (and has been for more than a quarter century) that liberal elites are disproportionately powerful in primaries–where they turn out in much higher numbers–and in the operations of the party itself. In presidential campaigns, these voters have nominated a succession of losers, including George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. The power of this wing of the party is easy to see in battles against Republican Supreme Court nominees, when Democratic opposition concentrates on such issues as abortion and sexual privacy to the virtual exclusion of questions of business versus labor, tort law, and the power of the state to regulate corporate activity.

For the Democrats, the influence of the upscale left has increased the party’s vulnerability to charges that it is weak on threats to the nation’s security and that its candidates are far from mainstream on social issues. Although the public has lost faith in President Bush and the GOP on a wide range of issues, the GOP continues to hold one trump card: terrorism. A May 10 New York Times/CBS News poll showed voters preferring Republicans to Democrats on terrorism by a margin of 40-35 percent. A more telling finding was in an Associated Press/Ipsos survey released July 14. It found that voters may not be thrilled with the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with terrorism (54 percent unfavorable, 43 favorable), but they are downright hostile to the Democrats’ approach (62 percent negative, 33 positive).

Paul Bedard, in US News, reports that the results of a Republican National Committee survey indicate that Republican voters are every bit as mobilized as the moonbat left.

81% of Republicans say they are “almost certain” to vote this coming November, and another 14% say they are “very likely” to vote.

93% of Republicans have “extremely strong feelings” on issues related to the War on Terror.

96% of Republians have “extremely strong feelings” on domestic issues including taxes, cultural values, and health care issues.

Republicans support President Bush by an 88-11 margin. And, faced with the democrat alternative, Republican voters support even this Republican Congress by an 84-6 margin.

In François Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim (1962), the lives of two Bohemian male friends, one French, one Austrian (played by Henri Serre and Oskar Werner), in pre-WWI Paris are changed forever by their making the acquaintance of the fascinating and mercurial Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Catherine is a kind of Anima, a force of Nature, a far stronger and more interesting personality than either of the pair, and she easily dominates one after another in turn, until Jim attempts to rebel. Catherine then responds by luring Jim into an automobile, and driving (with him in the car) straight off a bridge.

The democrat party is a lot like Jules and Jim: ineffectual and harmless in itself, but fundamentally allied to, and (in a way) in love with an activist radical left, which it cannot do without, cannot possibly control, and which (like Catherine) is not very nice underneath it all, and (like Catherine) dangerously mad.

Much of the democrat base is made up of people (like Catherine), who carry around a personal bottle of vitriol (“for lying eyes”), who are capable of turning mercilessly upon those closest to themselves (even those whom they have very recently supported for Vice President).

And (like Catherine), too, the democrat base’s madness has every likelihood of always, and inevitably, ending in (electoral) suicide.

One pictures Hillary Clinton walking out of the cemetery after installing the ashes of Joe Lieberman’s democrat party career in the niche, marching off sadly (like Jules). But, in this case, though Catherine may have committed suicide, she cannot herself die, and will get to commit suicide again and again.

I knew he was a commie, of course. But not until I read Martin Peretz, in the Wall Street Journal, did I realise that he is an hereditary commie of impeccable red-diaper origins: old money, with Exeter, Harvard, and Stalin as family traditions.

Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.

Jed Babbin contemplates the left wing of the democrat party’s impending excommunicaion of Joe Lieberman with glee, noting the concommitant assurance of that party’s permanent minority status.

the Michael Moore-Pinch Sulzberger-Cindy Sheehan Dems are about to purge poor ol’ Joe Lieberman from their party in Tuesday’s primary because he supports the war in Iraq. There’s no other issue among the Dems, as Chris Matthews rehearsed yesterday. Dan Rathercadaver — resurrected by Matthews to make his Sunday show the greatest black comedy since Dr. Strangelove — agreed solemnly. There’s no greater crime for a Dem than to voice any opinion other than the one the Washington Post wrote in an editorial on July 16, wringing its hands and blaming W for all the world’s ills: “But in the press of cascading crises, it is crucial that the administration not lose focus on the two wars it started and has yet to win.” (Italics added, superfluously.)

According to the Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday, Ned Lamont leads Lieberman by 54-41 percent. If Lieberman loses, we should be very grateful. If the anti-Bush media and the Democrats who follow its orders succeed in purging Lieberman, if they succeed in this danse macabre, the Dems will be headed off a cliff and not back to the White House in 2008.

A Lieberman loss will do two things. First, it will prevent the Dems from recovering from their leftward flat spin, and take them into the ground. Hard. Further claims to moderation or credibility on national defense will be laughable to anyone not sharing Bush Derangement Syndrome…

Second, a Lieberman loss will give uncontested control of the Democratic Party to its most left-leaning media bosses. Never forget, dear friends, that there are two political parties in America: the Republicans and the mainstream media. The Dems are so bereft of ideas, so unable to think seriously on any topic, they take their lead on everything from what the New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, ABC and NBC tell them. The AP-Hillary exercise in news manufacturing is only the overture to a symphony that will be playing from now until November, and again in 2008. And the Dems will follow in lockstep. After the New York Times editorial page endorsed Lamont, what else could the Dems do but choose him? They’ll scurry to follow orders, just as Vichy John Kerry flew home from Davos to filibuster Alito when the NYT ordered the Dems to do so…

The effect of a Lieberman purge should reverberate throughout America. A political party that cannot tolerate dissent, that cannot accept as legitimate any position that doesn’t hew to the leftmost fringe, cannot last unless its opponents fail to take advantage of its fundamental weakness. If the kiss on the cheek Lieberman got from the president proves to be the coup fatal, it could be one that produces a veto-proof Republican Senate.

Robert Kagan explains why Joe Lieberman is the last honest democrat, and how he is paying for it.

Twenty-nine Democratic senators voted in the fall of 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. There isn’t enough room on this page to list the Democratic foreign policy experts and former officials, including those from the top ranks of the Clinton administration, who supported the war publicly and privately — some of whom even signed letters calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any need to list the many liberal, and conservative, columnists on this and other editorial pages around the country who supported the war, or the many prominent journalists who provided the reporting that helped convince so many that the war was necessary.

The question of the day is, what makes Joe Lieberman different? What makes him now anathema to a Democratic Party and to liberal columnists who once supported both him and the war? Why is there now a chance he will lose the Democratic primary in Connecticut after so many years of faithfully serving that state and his own party?..

If Lieberman loses, it will not even be because he supported the war. Almost every leading Democratic politician and foreign policymaker, and many a liberal columnist, supported the war. Nor will he lose because he opposes withdrawing troops from Iraq this year. Most top Democratic policymakers agree that early withdrawal would be a mistake. Nor, finally, is it because he has been too chummy with President Bush. Lieberman has offered his share of criticism of the administration’s handling of the Iraq war and of many other administration policies.

No, Lieberman’s sin is of a different order. Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn’t recant. He didn’t say he was wrong. He didn’t turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn’t claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn’t try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn’t claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn’t go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted “public intellectuals.”

These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it.

Al Gore, the one-time Clinton administration hawk, airbrushed that history from his record. He turned on all those with whom he once agreed about Iraq and about many other foreign policy questions. And for this astonishing reversal he has been applauded by his fellow Democrats and may even get the party’s nomination.

Apparently, amazingly, dispiritingly, it all works. At least in the short run, dishonesty pays. Dissembling pays. Forgetting your past writings and statements pays. Condemning those with whom you once agreed pays. Phony self-flagellation followed by self-righteous self-congratulation pays. The only thing that doesn’t pay is honesty. If Joe Lieberman loses, it will not be because he supported the war or even because he still supports it. It will be because he refused to choose one of the many dishonorable paths open to him to salvage his political career.

He is the last honest man, and he may pay the price for it. At least he will be able to sleep at night. And he can take some solace in knowing that history, at least an honest history, will be kinder to him than was his own party.

But the intellectually and morally dishonest left will also pay a price for driving the last honest, responsible, and patriotic individuals out of the democrat party. They will continue to lose election after election, and their party’s support, and national influence, will continue to dwindle.

A college classmate this morning sent me a link to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne‘s somewhat premature attempt at dancing on American Conservatism’s grave.

Dionne is not entirely wrong, of course. He notes correctly that George W. Bush never was a real conservative in the Goldwater, Reagan, or Gingrich sense. But, personally, I wouldn’t waste my time constructing elaborate theories about Hamiltonian “big-government conservatism,” or using “government as a means to achieve conservative ends.” It’s really much simpler than that. George W. Bush is simply an old-fashioned garden variety practical politician (what we used to call an Eisenhower Republican), bringing to his Presidency his family’s traditional flexibility in governing, flavored with just enough red-state populism and Republican impulses to secure the GOP base’s support.

The American left has remained mobilized and afflicted with a paranoid sense of wrong ever since their favorite son’s sexual scandals metastasized into perjury and impeachment. Disappointment with the outcome of the 2000 election and US military actions following 9/11 have continued to keep the left as angry and active as a nest of red ants thoroughly poked with a stick. The larger part of George W. Bush’s perceived conservatism really amounts to mere reciprocated animosity.

Dionne is not inaccurate in describing this Congress.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

The Republican Senatorial majority unfortunately includes a number of liberal Republican-in-name-only senators, and has been effectively paralysed by joys-of-incumbency induced timidity and the democrats’ willingness to abuse the filibuster.

Dionne contends that the repeal of the death tax failed “because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.” Rubbish! There certainly is a majority in this country in favor of not taxing away a family’s assets simply because someone has died.

Poll after poll proves it.

a 1999 poll by Worthlin Worldwide found 70 percent of voters favoring a phase-out of the estate tax. — A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent of voters supporting elimination of the inheritance tax. — A 2001 CBS News/New York Times poll also found 71 percent of people opposing imposition of an estate tax at death.

Dionne would like to believe that libertarian versus traditionalist divisions are in the process of splitting the right on issues like immigration and stem cell research. Sorry, Mr. Dionne. It’s true that I disagree strongly with Michelle Malkin and Victor Davis Hanson about immigration, but our differences do not materially diminish my admiration and respect for those two traditionalists, nor are they likely to persuade Michelle, Victor, or myself to start voting for democrats. I don’t have a problem with stem cell research myself (being irreligious), but I believe President Bush was quite right to veto spending the tax dollars of religious people funding things they find morally repugnant. Let’s just finance this kind of research privately. There’s no shortage of rich atheists or leftists.

Dionne is off-base looking for a conservative split over religious issues these days. I’ve had plenty of differences within the Conservative Movement with religious traditionalists in days gone by, but there is no particular Religious Right agenda we libertarians have a major problem with today. I do have problems with organs of the left, like the ACLU, waging intolerant campaigns to eradicate any form of private religious expression in the public space, eliminating religious symbols, or persecuting the Boy Scouts for political incorrectness. In short, I expect most of us making up what Dionne calls the “big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives” are likely to continue to vote with the ordinary hometown Americans rather than with the coastal community of fashion indefinitely on into the misty future.

He’s right in saying this Congress is a disaster, and many of its members deserve to be defeated. I’ve said the same thing repeatedly myself. But what will lose in November will not be conservative principles, but the exact opposite. The losers will be the unprincipled, the compromisers and trimmers, and the opportunists.

The Conservative Movement, Mr. Dionne, has experienced setbacks and electoral defeats before. Those of us who lived through the Goldwater campaign of 1964 are not especially perturbed by the prospect of this coming November. We will be back.

———————
Hat tip to Steve Wagenseil.

Democratic Strategist Scott Winship looks at the national political division, and does not like the way the numbers break down:

• Adults, late 2004, based on my own analyses of the 2004 National Election Study: 35% liberal, 55% conservative (remainder are moderates, non-identifiers, or reported inconsistencies before and after the election)

• Adults, late 2004, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: 19% liberal, 39% conservative (remainder are moderate)

• Voters, late 2004, based on my own analyses of the 2004 National Election Study: 33% liberal, 56% conservative

• Likely Voters, January 2006, Democracy Corps: 19% liberal, 36% conservative

My own analyses are different from the others in that I have two responses from each person — one before and one after the election — and because the NES tries to get as many people as possible to choose either liberal or conservative rather than moderate. Anyway, the bottom line is that when respondents can choose “moderate”, roughly twice as many people identify as conservative as call themselves liberal. If moderates are forced to choose, they split roughly evenly, leaving 55-60 percent more conservatives than liberals. And these statements hold whether one is looking at adults, voters, or likely voters.

then tries to find comfort by classifying people who are libertarian as liberal. Personally, I don’t think this analysis will help much electorally.

OK, the response from those who don’t like these facts is invariably that a lot of people really are liberal, but the term has been made into a dirty word by conservatives. If you ask people about their policy preferences and values, liberals would be in the majority.

Of course, saying it doesn’t make it so, but this assertion could be true. To test it, I used the NES from 2004, first choosing questions from the survey related to values and values-laden issues; foreign policy and national security; economic and social policy; and fiscal policy.* Within each of these four domains, I created weights for each question based on how well it predicted the presidential vote. Then I categorized everyone as a liberal or conservative in each domain by seeing whether weighted liberal responses to the questions out-numbered weighted conservative responses. Finally, (de-glaze your eyes) I weighted the four liberal/conservative designations based on their predictive power and categorized everyone as an “operational” liberal or conservative.

Now the good stuff. Based on my weighting scheme, the country is evenly split between operational liberals and conservatives. Adults are conservative on foreign policy and national security (52 to 48) and values (62 to 38), but liberal on economic/social policy (57 to 43) and fiscal policy (60 to 40). Consistent with the idea that liberal is a stigmatized word, just 56 percent of operational liberals self-identified as liberal, while 30 percent self-identified as conservative. In contrast, 79 percent of operational conservatives said they were conservative.

It shouldn’t be surprising though. What does the left really have to offer America? A democrat electoral victory will simply ensure surrender and withdrawal abroad; higher taxes and more government programs at home; greater privileges and perquisites for that party’s client base of whiners, spongers, and the gender-dissatisfied; and a never-ending chorus of accusations for the rest of us.

A Texas judge threw out the most important of Activist Prosecutor Ronnie Earle’s indictments against the Texas Association of Business, targeted (along with Tom Delay and his Texans for a Republican Majority) for the alleged crime of interfering with the election of democrats.

A state district judge dealt a crippling blow Thursday to the nearly four-year prosecution of the Texas Association of Business, throwing out a felony indictment against the state’s largest business organization.

District Judge Mike Lynch ruled that 2002 pre-election ads produced by the group did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of Texas legislative candidates. Travis County prosecutors had said the group broke state election law by using corporate money to support candidates.

Lynch’s ruling put in doubt two other similar indictments pending against the organization by also discounting prosecutors’ alternative theory that the ads became illegal when the association coordinated them with other political groups. Lynch called the prosecutors’ argument “innovative” but concluded that state law does not cover it…

Lynch concluded that the ads did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates under the Texas Election Code, which he called “an archaic, cumbersome, confusing, poorly written document in need of serious legislative overhaul.”

The judge wrote that the prosecution’s legal theory on coordination between political groups is a “convoluted maze” that would not give a defendant adequate warning about what they are charged with.

Lynch noted that Earle eloquently argued that the association unfairly attempted to subvert the electoral process. But citing the deficiencies of the indictment and state law, he concluded:

“You simply cannot make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear.”

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Republican legislature to redraw (all but one of) Texas’s Congressional voting district lines in the GOP’s favor.

Fellow old-time Movement Conservatives will be amused to read Josh Trevino‘s comparison of the impotent and unhappy state of today’s Left with that of post-New Deal American Conservativism, viewing Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) as those poor lefties’ Robert Welch.

There was once a movement, born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. This movement saw itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it sought to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. But because the movement did feel embattled, and because it did view itself as the victim of powerful forces, it chose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It saw the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they could just crack the code — if it could grasp the very methodology of victory — then they would turn the tables, and victory would be theirs.

The American left today is not quite in the position of the American right circa 1960. But it is suffering nonetheless, having been in slow decline for the past quarter-century. Even when it wins the Presidency, it loses the Congress: and even when the President is the inept, uncommunicative George W. Bush, it still cannot make a dent in the ascendancy of its enemies. The end result of this is a group of Americans, identifying as members of the left, that is strikingly similar to the conservative movement of a generation past: inchoate, angry, and prone to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”..

Consider the average member of this group. He (or she) remembers the era of leftist dominance of American politics — and he remembers the beginning of its end, on election day 1980. He is around 50 years old. He is professional living in a coastal enclave, mostly on the Pacific coast or the northeast. His political consciousness was formed by the McGovern and Carter campaigns — and of course the American retreat from Vietnam. He may have grown up in Iowa, or Texas, or Missouri, or Utah — but he went to college elsewhere, and fell in love with the people in California, or New York, or Boston, who were so much more progressive and intellectual than the hayseeds back home. His initial concept of conservatives, which he’s never really abandoned, was formed by Nixonian malfeasance: they’re all crooks and corrupt, in his mind. The ascent of Reagan in 1980, and later the 1994 revolution, came as a profound shock — how could America forget so soon? He is well-off: and the bulk of his working career — and hence the font of his personal prosperity — was spent in the boom markets of the 1980s and 1990s, under Republican national governance in one form or another. He doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

But for all his generally good circumstances, he’s been on the political and cultural losing side all his adult life. He’s tired of it. And he’s found a website which, at last, makes him feel empowered. He is, in short, the typical member of the so-called netroots: the left-wing movement, organized around blogs, that seeks to “take back” this country from its usurpers. The netroots is a movement born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. It sees itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it seeks to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. Critically, it choose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It sees the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they can just crack the code — if it can grasp the very methodology of victory — then they will turn the tables, and victory will be theirs.

Sound familiar? It is — to us. To the left, it’s all very exciting, and all very new. And so we see the self-proclaimed netroots go through a trajectory very much like what the Birchers went through, albeit in highly compressed time. The elements are all there: the resentment, the conspiracy-mindedness, and especially the leaders with stupefyingly poor judgment married to Napoleon complexes. I’ve noted before that they are “frank proponents of outright mimicry of the mechanisms of GOP ascendacy.” Add to this the horrifying, alienating statements ranging from the mockery of dead Americans at war to the derision of political opponents’ personal sorrows. Add to this the demonization of the very people who should, in a sane world, be their friends — The New Republic chief among them — and the formula is complete. Messianism and paranoia marry to make this.

There’s already some evidence of pushback. The journalistic establishment won’t take the abuse forever. The purported agents of the Communist — sorry, the vast right-wing conspiracy won’t endure the smears indefinitely. And the left’s political establishment won’t kowtow endlessly — and certainly not so long as the netroots keep losing. For the sake of American civic life, one hopes this is true.

But for the sake of the enemy — we conservatives of all stripes — we need merely note that whereas they have a pint-sized Welch, they have no Buckley.

And, more importantly, no Rand.

You will be amused at this romance feature from the Sunday Times Style section. Sophia Raday, a typical Berkeley peacenik devoted to everything trendy leftie, recounts the story of how she fell for a West Point graduate, Oakland cop, and National Guard colonel.

MY husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange “simunitions” and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.

I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a “Bread, not bombs” button, end up married to The Man?

I like to tell people we met because he pulled me over, and I avoided the ticket with my feminine wiles. It’s not true, but our partnership is almost that unlikely. After all, I’ve been arrested several times in political protests and once for possession of marijuana. I’ve even trespassed onto a naval base to spray-paint protest messages over the sloganeering billboards.

My husband, on the other hand, subscribes to a magazine about wound ballistics, calls people he doesn’t like “communists” and distrusts anyone with a beard. He gets his hair cut at least twice a month. He loves to rub my hand over his spiky scalp while bragging about how especially “high and tight” it is this time.

The truth is, I met my husband on a blind date set up by a cousin who had gone to West Point with him. It amused me that on Tuesday night I was going out with a motorcycle-riding lesbian while on Wednesday I had a date with a soldier/cop. I wore a short skirt that showed off my long legs. When he arrived, I was charmed by his old-fashioned formality, how he called me “Miss Sophia” and pulled out my chair.

It was on our third date that I discovered he never left the house without a firearm. We went to see “Heat,” a crime drama with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and when we were driving home, I asked, “So when you’re off-duty, do you ever carry a gun?”

He laughed. “Always. Got one on my hip right now.”

I was delighted. This was high adventure. I liked having covert awareness of hidden things under his clothes. Dangerous things. And I liked the idea that I would try to tame him, that I would be the one to put a daisy in his gun.

———————————–

I mentioned this story to my wife, particularly noting the detail of the husband referring to people he doesn’t like as “communists.” My wife sniffed, and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

Karl Rove, in a NH interview quoted by Raw Story, opines that the rise of the Blogoshpere has proven a much more useful and positive development for Republicans than it has for democrats.

I do also think that the Internet has proven to be a more powerful tool on our side than it has been for the other side. It has proven to be a tool on our side to sort of unite Conservatives and have a healthy intra-movement dialogue. But it’s essentially been something that has helped us gain in influence and broaden our appeal. Among Democrats, my sense is that the blog world has tended to strengthen the far Left of the Democratic Party at the expense of liberal, but somewhat less liberal, members of their party. It has tended to sort of drive their party even further to the Left rather than focusing on good ideas that would help unite people around common goals and common purposes. Instead, the Internet for the Left of the Democratic Party has served as a way to mobilize hate and anger — hate and anger, first and foremost, at this President and Conservatives, but then also at people within their own party whom they consider to be less than completely loyal to this very narrow, very out-of-the-mainstream, very far Left-wing ideology that they tend to represent.