It is however, a great electoral strategy....for the general.

[Obama is absolutely wrong in his fundamental political analysis.  The problem in America today is not a polarized political system in which Democrats and liberals are as equally to blame as Republicans and conservatives]

He was a very effective legislator in Illinois and provided as much, if not more, leadership on important issues while in the Senate as Edwards and Clinton.

We are going to get either Obama or Clinton as a candidate. Neither is perfect, although on track record of voting Obama is margnally the more progressive.

However, at this point in the primary season, that discussion isn't very important any more either. We aren't picking the next President.We are picking a candidate. If we were picking a President it would be worth it for an individual Democrat to advocate for the person who has exactly the attitudes, voting records, style, etc. that suited the individual.  Since we are picking a candidate who has to win to be President that sort of preseverating on "I want, I want, I want.." is self-indulgent.

Electability is what mattters at this point since any of our candidates is better than any  of the Republicans and none of them can be elected by suiting BTD or me to a T.

Keep carping about Obama not being angry enough and we will end up with HRC as our candidate.

Nominate HRC and it is more likely than not that we will end up with McCain for President.

It is truly sad. I am not being snotty - it is sad.

Let me just quote an old Jewish maxim: Since the destruction of the Temple, prophecy was given to dunces.

Rosenberg:

The right wing has been highly successful in waging a virtually unopposed culture war for the past 30 years or so, and the blogosphere is one of the few newly emergent social institutions that has emerged during this time that is not just outside of their control, but actively opposed to it.

When Obama says that he doesn't want to get stuck fighting the same old culture wars of the 60s & 70s etc, it doesn't mean he would surrender old ground, I think it just means that we need newer tactics and strategy for a new time.  You may not agree with his strategy and tactics, and maybe they're wrong, but he has not gone over to the other side.

I think part of what's different are the times. ... the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into - he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing. ...

So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we're in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going right now aren't working, that we're bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having, and they're not useful. ...

And the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they're being debated among the presidential candidates, it's all tax cuts. Well, we know, we've done that; we've tried it.

Is that really so different than "The right wing has been highly successful in waging a virtually unopposed culture war for the past 30 years or so"?

That's not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.

So some of its the times and some of it I do think, there is a, there's maybe a generational element to this partly in the sense that I didn't come of age in the battles of the sixties. I'm not as invested in them. And so I think I talk differently about issues and I think I talk differently about values. And that's why I think we've been resonating with the American people. ... But what I'm saying is that I think the average baby boomer has moved beyond a lot of the arguments of the sixties, but our politicians haven't, we're still having the same arguments. It's all around culture wars and it's all you know even when you discuss war you know the frame of reference is all Viet Nam. Well that's not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is what works. And even when I first apposed the war in Iraq my first line was "I don't oppose all wars." You know specifically to make clear this is not just a anti-military you know seventies love-in kind of approach. It was rather that I thought strategically it was a mistake for us to go in.