Informed Speculation

…and he’s not too big on Congressional Democrats, either:

Judging from the amount of publicity they gleaned, the liberal bloggers who gathered in Las Vegas recently for the first annual YearlyKos convention represent the cutting edge of thinking in the Democratic Party.

But the blogs I have scanned are heavier on vituperation of President Bush and other targets than on creative thought. The candidates who have been adopted as heroes by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the convention’s leader, and his fellow bloggers have mainly imploded in the heat of battle — as was the case with Howard Dean in 2004 — or come up short, as happened to the Democratic challengers in special House elections in Ohio and California.

Fortunately, there are others than these “net roots” activists working on the challenge of defining the Democratic message. I do not include the Democratic congressional leadership in the hopeful camp. The new legislative “agenda” that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Co. trotted out last week was as meager as it was unimaginative. 

Broder sees hope, not surprisingly, coming from other, more centrist quarters:

…[T]his past week two new publications appeared — one online and the other in print — that promise to push the thinking of the opposition party even further.

Promising as they are, the two publications also show just how hard it is to break free from conventional wisdom without leaving the universe of realistic policy.

The Democratic Strategist, the new online publication, comes with highly reputable sponsorship. Its editors are William Galston, a former Clinton White House policy adviser now at the Brookings Institution; Stanley Greenberg, the pollster for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore; and Ruy Teixeira, an author now affiliated with two think tanks, the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation.

Alas, even this outlet has been invaded by Nutroots® unreality – already!:

…[T]he first issue is filled with pieces in which familiar Democratic names take up familiar positions, with few of them bothering to adduce any evidence to support their views.

Thus, we have blogger Jerome Armstrong, a Kos partner, arguing for mounting campaigns everywhere, no matter the odds; Robert Borosage of the leftist Campaign for America’s Future inciting Democrats to take on Big Oil and all of corporate America; civil rights activist Donna Brazile plumping for cleaning up elections; and the Kennedy School of Government’s Elaine Kamarck arguing that Dukakis-style “competence” should be the Democrats’ battle cry.

To be fair, some contributors, such as columnist Harold Meyerson and union president John Wilhelm, do root their arguments in solid economic or demographic trends. But as Galston conceded in an interview, the editors and the readers will have to be more insistent that future authors live up to the promise of the reality-based publication.

Jerome Armstrong, of course, is the Kos co-author who is under fire for signing a consent decree with the SEC on charges of stock manipulation.  Let’s not forget that, since the liberal blogs under the direction of Kos are trying to bury it.

Read the rest – it’s a pretty interesting op-ed that’s sure to earn Broder even more of that vituperation he noticed so quickly…