I promised to offer a few ruminations comparing and contrasting the DLC National Conversation in Nashville and the YearlyKos conference in Chicago, as one of a very few people who attended both events (though the National Education Association was a co-sponsor of both conferences).
Both events were well-attended, with probably 700 people in Nashville and 1500 (swelling to perhaps 2000 for the presidential candidate forum) in Chicago. They were pitched to very different audiences, with the DLC focusing on state and local elected officials (about 350 of whom showed up, from 45 states) and YKos billing itself as a bit of a netroots family reunion. Both events were very wonky on one level, with lots of workshops on a variety of policy and political topics. And in both Nashville and Chicago, there was plenty of Republican- and Bush-bashing; a sense of disdain for the horse-race/money-race coverage of the presidential campaign by the MSM; and a lot of optimism about Democratic prospects next year.
In terms of presidential preferences, there were no straw polls, but I’d guess that in Nashville the bulk of participants would lean towards Obama or Clinton (not sure which would actually lead), with Richardson, Edwards and Biden enjoying pockets of support. In Chicago, Obama and Edwards had the most visible support, but Clinton got a warmer welcome that most expected, and Richardson and Dodd clearly had support as well.
Neither event developed any sort of formal policy pronouncements or political manifestos. But in the workshop sessions, both dwelled on issues like global climate change, universal health coverage, and economic insecurity and inequality. The Nashville event, focused as it was on state and local electeds, didn’t have workshops on Iraq or national security issues (though there was one on homeland security), but during the public session, there was some talk of what might be described as a post-Iraq national security strategy. There was plenty of talk about Iraq in Chicago. But on the issues dividing Democrats (residual troop commitments and a funding cutoff strategy), the presidential forum was notably muted.
The major “tone” difference between the two conferences–aside from the natural excitement in Chicago over the presidential forum, and the frank disappointment in Nashville that the presidentials didn’t show up–was really about the nature of the fears underlying the general optimism going into 2008. In Nashville, the oft-expressed concern was about Democratic overconfidence, particularly in terms of the party’s credibility on national security, leading to an insufficient focus on swing voters and yet another close election. (This fear was articulated quite clearly today in a Washington Post op-ed by DLC Chairman Harold Ford, Jr., and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who spoke in Nashville). And in Chicago, the big fear (often linked to the FISA reauthorization which occurred, with significant Democratic support, the night before the presidential forum) was about Democratic temerity in the face of Republican efforts to once again play the “fear” card in 2008.
A subset of this difference in basic outlook towards the party’s problems is reflected in the general assumption made at each event about long-term Democratic strategy. In Nashville, the feeling was that Democrats needed to win big in 2008 and then “solve problems across party lines” in order to build a durable progressive majority. In Chicago, long-term Democratic prospects were most often linked to movement-building efforts, ranging from new media sophistication to mobilization of potential constituencies.
A final point of comparison, inevitably, is the extent to which these two Democratic gatherings fired bullets at each other.
In Nashville, there was plenty of grumbling about the presidentials tripping over each other to get to Chicago, balanced with observations that it actually made sense for them to do so, given the netroots’ importance in the nominating process. But the only “named” villain at the event (he was even rebutted by Bill Clinton) was, ironically, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, whose thank-you-now-go-away assessment of the DLC appeared in The New York Times the very day the conference began. It’s also worth mentioning that one of the featured speakers was Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who has been something of a netroots favorite for years.
In Chicago, I’m sure there was some DLC- and centrist-bashing going on in the various workshops, but it wasn’t terribly visible, and the general tenor was that the netroots represented all of the party, united in partisanship and a commitment to grassroots activism if not in ideology. New Dem types (e.g., Andrei Cherny, Ken Baer, Rob Shapiro, Austan Goolsbee, Gene Sperling) were sprinkled amongst the official speakers. There appeared to be a semi-conscious collective effort to ensure that Hillary Clinton got a respectful hearing at the presidential forum. Interestingly, forum co-moderator Joan McCarter did a post today listing some of the prepared questions that didn’t get asked, and one was to HRC about her feelings towards the DLC. But by the same token, Dennis Kucinich got booed for uttering one of the ancient Left intra-party arguments that “voters don’t think there’s much difference between the two parties.”
In the end, I came away from my Nashville-Chicago swing impressed more than ever by what unites Democrats against Republicans even among these two particularly different groups, and frustrated by the Dialogue of the Deaf that so often supplants healthy intra-party debate over real issues.
Self-conscious New Democrats need to understand that the netroots can no longer be dismissed as marginal, or unserious, or simply as a small group of people with a big internet megaphone. And they should also realize that there’s as much diversity of opinion in the netroots as in any other element of the party.
By the same token, netrooters should not let preconceptions about the DLC and its fellow-travelers blind them to what they are actually saying and doing. The spirit of partisanship in Nashville was very intense (viz. their extremely positive reaction to Drew Westen, the one speaker equally popular at both events). These are people who want Democrats to win very badly, and as Bill Clinton said there, the challenges the DLC helped him meet in 1992 are not irrelevant today. And though Markos Moulitsas did a post today mocking the “350 or so members” of the DLC, it’s worth remembering that these are elected officials who represent a lot of other Democrats and swing voters as well, and who have been largely ignored for many years by a DC-Centric national party.
In the end, if you eliminated the factional emblems in Nashville and Chicago and paid attention to the bottom line, there’s a lot of unity apparent on the surface and even underneath it. And attending both events gave me a better overall view of the current state of the debate among Democrats, and a renewed hope that it can be refocused on differences that actually matter instead of those that really don’t.
Ed Kilgore
The audience itself was interesting. I gather official registration for YearlyKos topped out at around 1500, but with the media and campaign worker hordes present, the forum may have drawn close to 2000 people. At the very beginning of the forum, Bai announced they would not follow the usual rule of seeking to suppress audience reactions. That turned out to be a useful if counter-intuitive decision. The audience reacted in some form to almost every candidate comment, including subtleties that would usually not elicit much response. It felt a bit like being in the middle of a huge focus group of political junkies.
When the candidates first trooped onto the stage, Obama won the initial applause-o-meter contest. But every candidate, including Hillary Clinton (who didn’t draw the initial boos some had anticipated) had at least one moment of heavy applause during the debate. Perhaps the most unusual development, as compared to previous debates, was the feral roar that met several of Mike Gravel’s patented screeds, though at least in my section of the room, quite a few people were laughing and grimacing as they applauded, clearly viewing Gravel as prime entertainment (and the Alaskan got his own share of hisses and groans when he was asked about his support for a national sales tax).
There was not a whole lot of overt audience-pandering during the forum. Clinton mentioned her support for “net neutrality” a couple of times. Kucinich clearly thought this particular audience needed to be reminded repeatedly of his support for a single-payer health care system. Dodd managed to work in a reference to his appearance last week on Bill O’Reilly’s show to challenge the host’s attacks on this very conference. And Edwards (generally considered the debate “winner” if there was one) followed a very consistent tack of stressing his combative attitude towards lobbyists (more about that in a minute) and Republicans; at one point, he even said his campaign was not being guided by a “political strategy,” a clever allusion to the netroots aversion to “poll-driven centrists.”
As you probably know if you saw any of the TV or newspaper coverage of the forum, the one “gotcha” moment occurred when Matt Bai directly asked HRC to respond to Edwards’ demand (which he repeated a second time to make sure the trap got properly baited) that all candidates follow his and Obama’s example by refusing to accept “a single dime from lobbyists.” After curtly refusing to give her fundraisers heart attacks by suddenly ruling out PAC contributions, Clinton did something I’ve never seen her do: she flubbed an answer. Instead of immediately touting her support for public financing (which Dodd did in a follow-up, to rapturous applause), or citing the need to match Republican campaign dollars, or even blurring the issue by reminding everyone that progressive causes have lobbyists, too–she basically said lobbyists represent real people, and she wants to represent everybody. It did not go over well.
But other than that, HRC, like all the candidates, were well-received. (At one point, McCarter was asking her a question about the current administration’s policies, and mistakenly said “President Clinton” instead of “President Bush.” HRC immediately quipped: “A Freudian slip.”) Efforts by Richardson, Dodd and Kucinich to hit Clinton and Obama over residual troop deployments in Iraq or a funding cutoff strategy fizzled, as they did in the CNN-YouTube debate.
Obama started slowly, but warmed up as the debate proceeded, and won high marks for a very substantive answer to an unusual question about how to deal with China. Richardson did as well as he could with the very first question of the debate (from McCarter), about his infamous debate citation of Whizzer White as a model for his Supreme Court appointments. (“I screwed up there,” he admitted, before going into a comfortingly conventional statement of commitment to pro-choice judges). After that, the New Mexican looked more relaxed than usual in the debate format, and got his share of applause. He also drew lusty boos after going out of his way to repeat his pledge to support a balanced budget constitutional amendment (via Ezra Klein, I just read Ben Smith’s great quip that this was “the first fiscal policy booing on record.”) Chris Dodd got a higher percentage of questions than in past debates, and took good advantage of them.
The perception that Edwards probably did himself more good than his rivals was reinforced by his answer to a question that was definitely the softest softball of the forum: an audience inquiry as to whether the candidates would appoint an Official White House Blogger. “I will,” he said. “And her name will be Elizabeth Edwards.” Clearly, the man didn’t win all those trials by being slow on the uptake.
Somehow or other, there were no questions about energy policy (which much as I think global climiate change is an overriding issue, I didn’t mind that the candidates didn’t soak up a third of the debate reciting their 35-point energy plans), and not much about health care. But it was a good event, with positive vibes attributable in no small part to the feeling that the netroots had “arrived”‘ by attracting the candidates.
Not having worked in the 2004 Dean or Clark campaigns, or lived in Montana, my personal acquaintance with bloggers has been pretty much limited to those in Washington, and even there, given the ever-shrinking amount of time I spend in the Emerald City, there are many I haven’t met.
I struck partial paydirt my first night in Chicago, at a party sponsored by Time Magazine’s Swampland blog at some sushi bar. After a few minutes of random conversation with people who weren’t particularly amused by my ancient and unoriginal joke about southerners inventing sushi (“We called it ‘bait'”), I found myself chit-chatting with a mild-mannered middle-aged guy who turned out to be Duncan Black, better known as the fiery Atrios. Within minutes, I also made the acquaintance of MyDD’s Adam Connor, TAPPED’s Ben Adler, not to mention Joe Trippi and two editors of realclearpolitics.com. Later that night, at an informal gathering at the conference hotel, I met Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation, a blogger and wonk whose work I have admired for eons. And then I spent some time talking and drinking Jim Beam with a tall young man who finally introduced himself as Bob Brigham, formerly of Swing State Project and now a political consultant in California. Brigham, you see, has probably written more abusive stuff about me than anybody else in the blogosphere. But we wound up trading war stories and even talking about possible projects we could cooperate on in the future.
On Saturday, after the presidential forum, I grabbed a very late lunch at a cookout sponsored by the Teamsters, risking the possibility that the sponsors, offended by my DLC-free-trade associations if not my pink polo shirt, would figure out who I was and beat me up. Instead, I ran into Joan McCarter (better known as the DailyKos front-page blogger McJoan), who was getting well-earned props from everyone there for her role in co-moderating the forum. Joan, whom I’d never met, is far and away the Kossack who’s been friendliest to me (succeeding Armando Llorens as my personal link to KosWorld), and she was generous enough to spend some time introducing me to other Kos front-pagers (e.g., Georgia10, DavidinNYC), not to mention several congressional candidates who were there in hopes of getting endorsed for ’08.
I didn’t have a chance to finally meet Markos Moulitsas himself (with whom I’ve exchanged many an email). Closest I got to him was at the Teamsters event, when he performed the unlikely task of introducing James Hoffa.
None of this personal outreach experience matters much to anyone other than me, but I have to say that all the folks I met at YearlyKos, including the people familiar with my background, were unfailingly polite and often positive about my own work (though sometimes only relatively, as in “Yes, you’re one of the reasonable ones Over There”). It’s often said that the relative anonymity of the blogosphere sharply reduces the perceived need for civility. Whether or not that’s true, “downloading” bloggers into real people can’t hurt.
After sitting through a couple of panels, I decided to “float” for a while in order to get a better sense of all the topics under discussion.
One of the largest panel discussions (never did quite figure out the distinctions between panels, workshops and roundtables) was entitled: “Ned Lamont for Senate: What really happened?” This session was enlivened by an apparently unexpected appearance by Lamont himself, who credited the blogosphere with the initial viability of his candidacy.
During the time I was in the room, all the discussion of the Lamont campaign focused on his primary win rather than his general election loss. This brought home once again that the whole Lamont-Lieberman experience can be used to reinforce diametrically opposed points of view about the future direction of the Democratic Party (personally, I think the contest was entirely sui generis, and of limited predictive value).
I also stopped by a session called “Blogging While Female,” featuring Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte (one of the famous former Edwards bloggers), TAPPED’s Garance Franke-Ruta, Feministing’s Jessica Valenti, and YearlyKos organizer Gina Cooper. The talk there focused to a large extent on the hate mail and very personal threats of violence many women in the blogosphere routinely encounter, to the point where some have felt constrained to enlist protection from law enforcement officials. The chilling examples the panelists provided certainly shamed people like me who have in the past gotten agitated and aggrieved by the occasional email or comment-thread insult (you know, corporate whore, AIPAC stooge, Republican Lite, etc., etc.).
There was also some discussion of the overall lack of diversity in the blogosphere, which has been a source of general anxiety at this and at the first YearlyKos. To tell the truth, the overall gender (and for that matter, age) balance at the conference, as measured subjectively, seemed to be better than I would have expected. But it was most definitely a highly honkified event, with less racial diversity than, say, the DLC conference in Nashville (something the DLC has worked on for many years). Diversity concerns were reportedly one reason YearlyKos organizers have decided to rename next year’s event “Netroots Nation,” as part of an effort to expand participation well beyond the readership of DailyKos.
Trippi’s rap mainly dealt with the vast growth of internet-based campaign organizing and fundraising in the current presidential cycle, and especially with the concentration of this growth on the Democratic side of the partisan
divide. The Democratic nominee in ’08, he argued, will enter the general election battle with an extraordinary advantage over the GOP nominee in terms of pre-mobilized citizens (including campaign contributors) and new media savvy.
Armstrong got into the nuts and bolts of how internet-based politics was affecting the internal organization of campaigns, beginning with small “internet-outreach” efforts and quickly changing the structure of most campaigns’ political, communications, and fundraising departments.
All the panelists agreed that the long era of domination of campaigns by paid broadcast media strategies was coming to an end.
In answering a question from a Texan about technology and Hispanic voter outreach, Rosenberg talked about last year’s monster pro-immigrant rallies as an example of where new media trends may go next. These rallies, said Rosenberg, were largely organized, almost overnight, via Spanish-language talk radio (the third largest radio format in the U.S. today) and text messaging. With the continued evolution of cell phone technology (e.g., the I-phone), it is increasingly likely that this will become the dominant medium for political communications in the near future.
I’m about to do a series of posts about the YearlyKos conference in Chicago this weekend (having chosen against weekend blogging, which hardly anyone was going to read).
It was quite an event, aside from the presidential forum on Saturday. The most frequent comment I heard, uttered by confirmed Kossacks and more mainstream types alike, was that the conference reflected the maturing of the netroots from an anguished collection of self-conscious outsiders into an accepted constituency group (overlapping with many others) of the Democratic Party. The focus was less on intra-party disputes than on the question of how to win in 2008. And the atmosphere was more ecumenical and less left-triumphalist than I expected. These are all relative terms, and I’m not suggesting all or even most of the participants have lost their edge, for good or for ill. But the whole thing felt like a normal and healthy Democratic gathering–with about 800 laptops. (I’ll mention a few stranger moments as I go along).
As indicated in my Friday post, the first thing I attended in Chicago was a panel on public opinion. If you read the previous staff post about Democracy Corps’ latest strategy memo, you’ll get a sense of what Stan Greenberg had to say: the basic dynamics of public opinion going into 2008 are actually better than those Democrats enjoyed two years ago. Indeed, said Greenberg, the deterioration of Bush’s approval ratings and the intensification of “wrong track” sentiment has accelerated more since 2006 than it did between 2004 and 2006. All seven of the targeted Republican Senators up in 2008 have terrible “re-elect” numbers. And given the very strong position of the “Class of 2006” of House Democrats, and the persistent vulnerability of many Republicans, additional House gains look plausible as well.
On the same panel, Mark Blumenthal, a.k.a., the Mystery Pollster, focused on the Democratic presidential nominating contest, and stressed the exceptional volatility of public opinion in the pre-primary period, with John Kerry’s astonishing rise in 2004 being just one of many historical examples. One particularly interesting nugget he offered was the hypothesis that Iowa and New Hampshire’s impact represents an inchoate feeling that voters there have paid greater attention to the candidates than those in “later” states, and essentially serve a vetting process for the rest of the country.
In the Q&A after this panel, one audience member asked about the disconnect between Hillary Clinton’s popularity among rank and file Democrats, and her lack of support in the blogosphere. Chris Bowers jumped on the question with encyclopedic thoroughness, going through the demographic characteristics of progressive bloggers (disproportionately white, male, upper-income, self-identified liberal, and secular) and concluding: “If the Democratic electorate looked like the blogosphere, Hillary Clinton would be in big trouble.”
I’m in Chicago for the next three days, at the YearlyKos gathering of bloggers and other netroots folk. It’s quite an assemblage, with a massive, complex schedule of workshops, panels and roundtables, requiring a color-coded schedule that requires several moments to figure out. The big national news will be the appearance of presidential candidates at a forum tomorrow. But most of the candidates are also holding smaller, break-out sessions. When I registered, Obama’s and Edwards’ had already closed out.
I’ve just entered a panel discussion called Public Opinion Matters, featuring TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg, independent pollster Joel Wright, OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers, MoveOn.org’s Tom Mattzie, and Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal (a.k.a. The Mystery Pollster). It was (or at least seemed like) a mile walk up various escalators at McCormick Place to the appropriate meeting room, but there is a great view of Lake Michigan for those who tire of poll numbers.
I’ll file a report a bit later.
Rudy Giuliani’s loud if not very specific comments on health care policy yesterday pretty clearly signify an ever-greater polarization of the two parties on this subject, and perhaps a hightening of the issue’s importance in the 2008 presidential campaign. Giuliani’s hard-right position on health care also reinforces my earlier argument that Democrats need to make up their minds where to draw the lines between Ds and Rs on health care.
Over at The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn skillfully dissects RudyCare, and demolishes it as a serious effort towards universal health care. It’s really just a restatement of George W. Bush’s thoroughly discredited “thinking” on the subject, accompanied by massive demagoguery aimed at tapping conservative hatred of Michael Moore and of “Old Europe.”
The Progressive Policy Institute’s Dave Kendall has a piece up at the DLC’s Ideas Primary site going a bit further, stressing the Giuliani-Bush approach’s atavistic, Social Darwinist demands for individual health care purchasing.
So why is the supposed “centrist” Rudy Giuliani embracing this position, which he would undoubtedly have mocked as mayor of New York? Aside from the obvious fact that he wants to burnish his credentials for economic conservatism in order to obscure his less-than-conservative credentials on cultural issues, Rudy may be preparing a major Assault From the Right on Mitt Romney over the health care plan the Mittster signed in Massachussets, which heavily depends on “socialist” collective purchasing schemes. This could get tricky for Giuliani, complicating his efforts to get an endorsement from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed a health care plan similar to Romney’s. More generally, it would create the interesting spectacle of the two leading GOP “moderates” battling to outflank each other on the Right on different sets of issues.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d repeat that the GOP’s lurch to the Radical Right on health care forces Democrats to make a fundamental choice: Do we accept the universal/non-universal or government/private distinctions GOPers are seeking to make between their health care plans and ours? Or do we focus on exposing the GOP’s fundamental hostility to even the status quo’s efforts to encourage pooled purchasing and community rating?
The answer may depend on whether Mitt Romney or someone else is the Republican nominee, but it’s not too early to begin thinking about it now.
The appearances by Democratic presidential candidates at the YearlyKos conference (which begins tomorrow) will undoubtedly intensify the “Dems rush to the left” story-line beloved of MSM pundits and conservative bloggers.
At this point, It’s worth following Kevin Drum’s example by asking if the presidentials really reflect, on a substantive level, an abandonment of Clintonian “centrism.” Here’s Kevin’s take:
if YearlyKos were genuinely more substantively powerful than the DLC, you’d see the big three candidates taking public positions considerably to the left of the party’s positions ten years ago. If that’s the case, though, I’ve missed it. No one’s talking about rolling back welfare reform. No one’s proposed a healthcare initiative even half as comprehensive as the 1994 Clinton plan. All three candidates continue to claim they’re personally opposed to gay marriage. Their rhetoric on guns and abortion is much more muted than in the past. They mostly agree that some of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, but not much more. They want to get out of Iraq, but that’s a thoroughly mainstream position, and none of them are willing to commit to a complete withdrawal in any case.
I’d add a few flourishes here. A year and a half ago, when the editors of The New Republic followed Al Gore in endorsing a single-payer health care system, I’d have bet serious money that at least one if not more of the major Democratic candidates for president in 2008 would support the same idea. But they didn’t.
The same trend, or lack thereof, is visible on an issue that matched welfare reform in signifying the “centrist” credentials of Democrats in the Clinton years: fiscal discipline. Despite quibbles over exactly how high this candidate or that ranks deficit reduction in his or her hierarchy of priorities, the fact remains that most Democrats are more committed to fiscal discipline–and can prove it–than most Republicans. That would not be true in a party “rushing to the left.”
More immediately, where are the candidates on the intra-party disputes that are most animating the progressive blogosphere at present? One is definitely the “residual troop commitment” issue with respect to Iraq; yet the two leading Democratic candidates persist in supporting residuals, despite netroots arguments that this represent a desire to continue the war indefinitely. And another is impeachment. If any of the major Democratic candidates is going to go to Chicago for YearlyKos and thrill the audience with support for impeachment, it’s a closely held secret.
Kevin doesn’t mention trade policy or education policy, where the case for an abandonment of Clintonism is strongest. But both issues are hard to pigeon-hole ideologically; globaphobia comes from the Right and Center as much as from the Left, and the same is true of deep hostility to No Child Left Behind.
The whole effort to use the DLC and YearlyKos conferences, and who attends one or the other, to show a vast ideological shift in the Democratic Party is misbegotten on several levels. The “Left” nature of the Kos-centered netroots has been grossly exaggerated; and the DLC’s reputation for willingness to support Bush policies has never been well-earned. We’re in a political context right now where Bush’s extremism has simultaneously made virtually all Democrats much more partisan and combative, while opening up the political “‘center” in ways that tend to unite rather than divide progressives on most policy issues. Let’s don’t get too distracted by the “rush to the left” argument.
One of the most contentious issues dividing political observers at present is how to interpret the partisan implications of the public’s exceptionally sour mood, which extends to the Democratic-controlled Congress as well as the Bush administration.
The reigning theme among Beltway pundits is that Americans are sick of gridlock and partisanship in Washington, and blame both parties equally. There’s a variant of this theme that’s popular in some precincts on the Left: that the Democratic Congress’s support is collapsing because it has been insufficiently confrontational towards Bush, particularly on Iraq; according to this analysis, cutting off funds for the war, or perhaps even moving towards impeachment of Bush and Cheney, is the only way to save Democrats from complicity with a hated status quo.
The other side of the argument has been carefully presented in the latest Democracy Corps strategy memo by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Anna Iparraguirre. Relying on polling on both congressional and presidential preferences, including its ongoing “battleground district” research, the DCorps trio concludes that the partisan conflict in Washington is not eroding, and may actually be enhancing, a strong Democratic advantage going into 2008.
Here’s their key conclusion:
Right now, Republicans own everything, including the gridlock, the direction of the
country and Iraq. There is no other way to understand the rock solid stability of the Democrats’
current leads. We went to the bottom line and asked this question, ‘The gridlock in Washington
leads me to want to see’ — ‘more Democrats elected to the Congress’ or ‘more Republicans
elected to the Congress.’ We asked the same question but in the context of the vote for President.
In both cases, the margin for the Democrats is at least equal to the current advantage in the vote.
Rather than pulling down the margin, the current battle is confirming the desire for change in
who leads in Washington.
Unsurprisingly, DCorps suggests that individual Democratic members of Congress–and a fortiori Democratic challengers of Republican incumbents–should not identify themselves too closely with Congress as an institution, since there’s not much evidence at present that they are being held accountable for the alleged shortcomings of the congressional leadership. Indeed, it’s interesting that the class of ’06 of Democratic House members elected from previously Republican districts (as measured by “named” polling) seems, according to DCorps’ findings, to be in significantly better shape than the Democratic presidential field (as measured by generic preferences). If that’s right, then it reinforces the argument that the most important challenge facing Democrats in ’08 is to ensure the presidential contest remains a referendum on the Bush administration as a reflection of what the GOP stands for, past, present and future.
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