Washington’s Secretary of State (a Republican) has now officially certified Christine Gregoire’s election as Governor by 129 votes following a hand recount of ballots, the last stage in the state’s process for recounting votes in a very close election. But losing GOP candidate Dino Rossi, who had taken to calling himself “Governor-elect” after holding infinitesimal leads prior to the hand recount, is not accepting the certified results, and is demanding a new election.
There was nothing shady or unexpected about Gregoire’s taking the lead after the hand recount. Most Washington counties use optical scanners, a voting method which, despite its many virtues, tends to produce a significant number of counting errors, usually to the detriment of Democratic candidates. A few weeks ago, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox told me she was certain Gregoire would ultimately prevail for that very reason.
As for Rossi’s refusal to concede, there is, of course, a great deal of irony in the inability of a Republican candidate to accept a Republican certification of an election. As I am sure we all remember, George W. Bush’s success in the 2000 post-election legal wrangle owed a great deal to his campaign’s decision to treat certification of the results as a “final victory,” and to denounce the Gore campaign’s efforts to secure hand recounts as an attempt to overturn the results.
In this case, we not only have a certified result, but a certified result following a hand recount, so Rossi is hardly entitled to bitch. I recommend that Washington Democrats speedily begin referring to Governor-elect Gregoire as “Governor,” and to her vanquished opponent as Dino “Loser” Rossi. Sauce for the geese, sauce for the gander.

Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about “cultural issues,” but in this post, I’d like to take on the subject more systematically.
There’s been a less-than-illuminating back-and-forth debate on the importance of “moral values” in the 2004 elections that’s been going on since November 3. Some observers saw that “moral values” was the single most important factor cited by voters in the Edison exit polls, and went stampeding off into a variety of colorful hysterics about the vast gulf in weltanschaung between “red state” and “blue state” Americans.
Others then noted both the vagueness of this category, and the unnatural importance assigned to it by the exit-poll practice of dividing up other issues (e.g., national security and domestic governance) into smaller categories that diminished their apparent significance. But these same observers often stampeded off into ridiculous overstatements of the irrelevancy of cultural issues, typically by arguing they were no more significant this year than in 2000–which is a bit like saying that baseball salaries aren’t too high because they didn’t much go up over the last twelve months.
The first step towards clarity about “moral values” is to distinguish the two very different ways in which this term is typically used: (a) the relative ability of politicians to frame their biographies, their principles, their agendas, and their messages in terms that convey a distinct sense of the values that matter more to them than personal power and ambition; and (b) a set of concerns about “moral issues” which typically touch on various perceived threats to “traditional values,” including the nuclear family, parental and social authority, personal responsibility, the strength of faith communities, and in general, the belief in the ability of Americans to perceive and enforce clear standards of “right” and “wrong” behavior.
There is a pretty strong consensus among Democrats today that we need to do something to strengthen the party on the first definition of “moral values.” And that’s a very good thing. As a coalition party, Democrats have to try harder than the ideologues of the GOP to articulate the values that unite them, even as they sometimes disagree on policy positions or political strategies. And as the party of public sector activism, Democrats inherently have a more complex agenda and message than the ostensibly anti-government Republicans, and have to try harder to avoid the gobblydegook language of government programs and policy nuances.
This should not be a matter of simply wrapping Democratic policy positions in “values language” or, God forbid, “God Talk.” What’s needed is a re-engineering of Democratic message to place values first, policy goals second, and programmatic ideas third and last. And for those of you who think of the DLC as unprincipled, poll-driven opportunists, I will mention here that we have been conducting values-based message and agenda training for state and local elected officials for seven years, pushing literally hundreds of Democrats, many of whom had no prior relationship with us, and some of whom disliked us going in, into rethinking their basic principles, uniting around values and big policy goals, and then developing an ideas agenda aimed at reflecting those values and implementing those policy goals. In many cases, these Democrats came up with policy positions the DLC would not necessarily agree with, but we didn’t care (please note this, Kos, since you consistently claim the DLC is determined to impose some ideological litmus test on the party).
I’m not arguing that there’s anything unique about our approach, but Democrats of all stripes should undertake something similar, as a matter of principle and of political survival.
But it’s the second definition of “moral values”–the one that deals with what we think of as “cultural issues”–that hangs fire among many Democrats.
The case for trying to improve Democratic performance among voters worried about “cultural issues” is pretty obvious: we are consistently losing millions of voters, especially white non-college educated men and women, whose economic interests would normally indicate support for Democrats. And to those who argue that only a hyper-populist economic message can win these voters back, the big counter-example is Bill Clinton, who won them in both 1992 and 1996, in no small part because he was able to deal with cultural issues more directly and sensitively, without in any way abandoning progressive policy positions.
What did Clinton do that Al Gore and John Kerry couldn’t do on cultural issues? He did two simple things: (a) projecting a message that acknowledged the legitimacy of cultural concerns, and found common ground, as in making abortion “safe, legal and rare,” and defending both gay rights and the right of states to define marriage; and (b) directly addressing concerns about cultural threats to the traditional family by advancing a limited but family-friendly agenda of proposals (derided by pundits at the time) like expanded family leave, youth curfews, school uniforms, and V-chips. And had the issue fully emerged during his presidency, there is almost zero doubt that Clinton could have found a way to support public partnerships on social projects with faith-based organizations in a way that honored religious communities’ contributions without abandoning separation of church and state.
Simply emulating Clinton’s approach would be a good first step towards de-toxifying cultural issues, but in today’s more polarized and mistrustful atmosphere, Democrats must do more. And the obvious place to start is by extending the routine Democratic demand for corporate responsibility to the entertainment corporations which purvey the sex-and-violence saturated products that emblemize the threat to traditional culture so many Americans perceive.
The unwillingness of many Democrats to “go there” is strange but pervasive. Some, of course, simply view Hollywood as a reliable source of campaign contributions that must not be criticized, a cynical approach that reinforces every conservative stereotype about the party. Others change the subject by claiming that any effort to promote some self-regulation of entertainment products amounts to censorship or even repression, as though the utterances of Paris Hilton, as opposed to those of Joe Camel, merit judicial protection. And still others resist the very idea of “compromise” with the yahoos who watch reality shows three hours a night but profess to deplore the hellbound direction of American culture. (History, of course, shows repeatedly that the most culturally threatened people are those who are complicit in the tranformation of culture from what they honor to what they desire).
It’s not that hard for Democrats to identify with, and reassure, culturally threatened Americans that they live in the same moral universe, and that they are vastly superior to the GOP in their ability to manage change–economic, cultural, and geo-political–in a way that reflects our common values and respects our differences. But we can’t do that if we continue to deny or minimize this problem, or pretend that cultural concerns are a fool’s substitute for material matters.
The lesson we learned in 2004 is that our obtuseness on “moral values”–in both the senses discussed above–enables a cynical and in many respects immoral GOP to pose as the cultural champion of people they fully intend to betray. And continuing to let them do that is the ultimate, damning judgment on the “moral values” of Democrats.

The next stop in the discussion of lessons learned during this painful Year of Our Lord 2004 is the subject of Democrats’ difficulties in projecting a strong and confident message and agenda on national security.
There’s a reasonably broad consensus among Democrats on the importance of this problem for the Kerry campaign, though (a) there are still those who believe Kerry should have largely conceded the issue to Bush and just hammered away at the economy and health care, and (b) there are even more (perhaps four out of five supporters of a certain Doctor) whose idea of a “strong and confident” security message was to simply and loudly oppose the invasion of Iraq. At the other end of the consensus are those, for whom The New Republic has been the major post-election sounding board, who think security dwarfs every other Democratic handicap, and who argue for a forceful repudiation of non-interventionist and “soft multilateralist” views as a threshold requirement for Democratic recovery.
Perhaps the first step we should take in properly assessing the security issue is to recall that this has been a persistent problem for at least a quarter-century. Anyone who didn’t live through the Carter administration as a news-watching adult can barely imagine the extent to which the last pre-Clinton Democratic president became identified with U.S. weakness and futility. The botched hostage rescue attempt in 1980 was the absolute nadir in modern American military and diplomatic prestige. And in the 1980s and through the First Gulf War, Democrats were divided on national security issues, while Republicans got (unearned) credit for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and a series of easy military victories in Granada, Panama and Iraq.
Bill Clinton did a lot to lay to rest the post-Vietnam legacy of weakness and division of the Democratic Party on security matters by deploying military force, though the Kosovo intervention was the only action that resembled the previous administrations’ relatively cost-free victories.
But frankly, and this is important to remember today, the American people did not much care. You probably have to go back to the mid-1930s to find a time when the U.S. population was so resolutely uninterested in world events as it was in the 1990s. Mark Penn did a survey for the DLC in 1997 that used a technique called “conjoint analysis,” which aimed at discovering which options in policy positions in four broad areas (economy, role of government, “values” and international affairs) most determined the decision to vote for one candidate over another. To our shock (and, as Democratic internationalists, our dismay), Penn found that there was virtually no position on international issues, encompassing national security, foreign relations, and trade, that could “turn” a voter. And this disinterest was not simply a matter of post-Cold War fatigue or “isolationism:” political and economic freedom appeared to be sweeping the globe with little or no direct involvement by the U.S. government or military. Aside from Kosovo, the “national security” debates of the Clinton era generally revolved around exactly how fast to pare back defense spending, along with relatively marginal arguments about military pay, base closing decisions, and a few weapons systems.
So: when it is said that “9/11 changed everything” in terms of the political importance of national security, we should remember that the sense of disjunction was partly attributable to the remarkable, and historically anomalous, 1991-2001 era it replaced. In many respects, the country returned to its pre-1991 psychology, which included persistent doubts about the national security credentials of the Democratic Party. And that’s the background–raised in even higher relief by a 2002 cycle in which Democrats kept trying to change the subject to domestic issues–against which the impact of national security on the 2004 presidential election must be assessed.
At an analytical level, John Kerry did a creditable job of handling national security issues, especially towards the end of the campaign when he consistently blasted the administration for an Iraq adventure that distracted from the war on terrorism, essentially adopting the Bob Graham-Wes Clark “right idea, wrong Arabs” approach of opposing the war on national security grounds. But he never achieved the simplicity of the Graham-Clark message, in part because of his own wandering views on Iraq, and in part because the other elements of his national security agenda sounded like a Foreign Service School master’s thesis, which a lot of fine detail but little in the way of a clear overarching theme. And that’s where Bush and his allies really nailed him as a guy who had trouble making decisions about national security without an extraordinary number of qualifiers. The “87 billion” issue was devastating because it offered what appeared to be a simple choice of supplying the troops or not, and Kerry came across as a guy who couldn’t satisfy the commander-in-chief qualification of decisiveness on national security, running against an incumbent whose message was that he would never think twice about using force when he thought it was necessary to protect the country and its interests.
Mesmerized no doubt by polls showing increasing public doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq war, Kerry’s advisers pushed him to exploit that weakness at every stop. In the end, however, the folly of the admninistration’s Iraq policy did little or nothing to undermine public faith in Bush’s record on fighting terrorism generally, and that, not Iraq, was the ball game on national security. At a subrational level, many Americans who were disturbed by the course of events in Iraq–and retroactively, by the deceptions Bush used to get the war going–probably sized up Bush as follows: some Arabs killed a lot of Americans; Bush killed a lot of Arabs, and whatever else happened, there were no more attacks on the United States. Kerry’s critique of Bush’s record never adequately addressed those feelings, while reinforcing Republican claims that Kerry would be another Jimmy Carter, all talk and deliberation, but little or no action in difficult cases.
Now that we are past the “first-post-9/11” presidential election, and the original decision to invade Iraq is becoming less relevant to the present situation, are Democrats over the worst of their national security handicap? Can they unite around a credible and distinct message and agenda that convinces a majority of Americans they can be trusted to defend the country decisively, but more intelligently than the bellicose and unilateralist GOP?
There are real grounds for optimism here. At the level of policy elites, there’s not a lot of disagreement among Democratic foreign policy thinkers about the road forward for America, even if there remain disagreements about the road that led us to Baghdad. Early this year, the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, helped put together a manifesto entitled Progressive Internationalism that presented a tough, smart, clear foreign policy strategy for the country that was highly critical of Bush without succumbing to defeatism in the war on terror or ignoring the real differences that will continue to cause problems between the U.S., our traditional allies, and multilateral organizations. A very broad array of Democratic foreign policy gurus signed onto this document. It’s probably a good first draft for Democratic unity on international issues going into the next election cycle.
But on the other hand, there are differences of opinion among Democrats–especially among party activists–that go deeper than Iraq. As University of Maryland professor and long-time DLC advisor (and, for the record, a vocal opponent of the decision to invade Iraq) Bill Galston has often pointed out, when asked if they believe U.S. military power is, on balance, a force for good or evil in the world, Americans endorse the positive view by a four-to-one margin. But the vast majority of the 20% who take what might be called the Michael Moore position are Democrats. This is the reality that led Peter Beinart in his now-famous post-election essay to argue that Democrats will never shake their reputation of weakness, irresolution, and yes, even anti-Americanism until they decisively repudiate this point of view, even if it means intra-party heartburn.
Now, it’s possible that after another four year of governance by George W. Bush that 20% figure will rise to something approaching an electoral majority (though it almost certainly will not do so in places like the South). And it’s also possible, as Noam Scheiber argued in his response to Beinart, that Michael Moore Democrats will loyally support an overall foreign policy they don’t necessarily agree with in the broader interest of getting rid of the incompetent warmongers of the GOP. But unsettling as it is, this is a subject that will require continued, honest debate among Democrats over the next two-to-four years.
The main lesson we learned on national security in 2004 can be summed up by the warning Bill Clinton provided Democrats nearly two years ago: given a choice, Americans will support candidates who are strong and wrong over those who are (or who appear to be) weak and right. In George W. Bush, we had the perfect example of strong-and-wrong, so it’s clear the continuing weakness of the Democratic Party on national security had a lot to do with his re-election.

Happy Holidays to everyone, and to my co-religionists, Merry Christmas.
Down here in Central Virginia, it’s a relatively peaceful holiday, though the peacock nearly froze last night; the water pump from the spring went out for the second time in a month yesterday (potentially the result of sabotage by a jealous wannabe land owner); and my kid’s new dog devoured a ham bone intended for the beanpot.
Also late yesterday afternoon, I was sent on an essential supply run to the one place in the region still open: yes, that pariah of all left-thinking people, Wal-Mart, packed right up until closing time with less-than-prosperous looking folk trying to squeeze five toys for their children into a four-toy budget. It was a good illustration of the tangled morality of “low-road” retailers: which struggling families benefit, and which suffer, and who has the scales to measure it all? I certainly didn’t as I struggled to the parking lot loaded down with a small bag of loot and a large bag of guilt, with not an economist in sight to make me feel definitively better or worse.
In any event, despite my strong antipathy to Christmas commercialism and greed, I’m happy with my own haul of presents: Bruce Chilton’s Rabbi Paul, Michael White’s From Jesus to Christianity, Jessica Stern’s Why Religious Militants Kill, Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and one CD, Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose, which combines the skills of two of my favorite country and rock ‘n’ roll talents (the latter, of course, being Jack White). I got yet another book, entitled Enslaved by Ducks, a humorous account of a man’s gradual servitude to family pets, but can’t find the author’s name because the dog’s already destroyed the cover and the title page.
I’ll continue my posts on political lessons learned in 2004 tomorrow or so, but now it’s time to pack up all the wrapping paper I bought from various school fundraisers over the last year and decide whether to assuage my residual Christmas guilt by taking them twenty miles to the county recycling bin.
BTW, in entitling this post with the abbreviation “Xmas,” I’m reminded that an earlier version of the right-wing campaign to convince Christians that secular humanist jackboots are about to kick down their doors and smash their Christmas trees occurred during my childhood, when certain religious figures claimed “Xmas” was an effort to take “Christ out of Christmas.” It was years before I realized that the “X” was for the Greek letter “Chi,” an early Christian abbreviation of “Christ.”

It’s traditional at the end of the year to take stock of the previous twelve months and derive lessons learned. And when it comes to politics, we Democrats have been subjected to some tough schoolin.’ So between now and New Year’s Eve, I’ll do a series of posts outlining what we’ve learned and what remains in the realm of debate and (sometimes) dissension.
Perhaps the most surprising development of 2004 was the re-election of a president with a shaky record, a vague (at best) second-term agenda, and a strategy focused on ideological polarization and base mobilization. This is the first time since 1948 that such a strategy has worked for an incumbent president, and it’s arguably only the second time (the other being 1988) since then that a presidential candidate has won while doing relatively little to reach out to swing voters and other “persuadables.”
Some Democrats have interpreted this development as a clear sign that we should do likewise, forgetting about swing voters and simply doing everything imaginable to get our own base excited. Of course, some of those same Democrats would favor that strategy no matter what the 2004 results indicated. Let’s don’t forget that people like Joe Trippi were arguing a year ago that the best model for Democrats was the Goldwater ’64 approach of slow but steady movement-building around a hard-core oppositional message.
There are several problems with this proposed “lesson learned.”
1) Bush’s polarization strategy worked in no small part because conservatives outnumber liberals by a three-to-two margin nationally, and by better than a two-to-one margin in some relatively competitive “red states.” This means Democrats have to win moderates by a sizeable margin; Kerry won them by 11, and it wasn’t enough. It’s hard to see how a Democratic strategy of pure counter-mobilization will do anything other than reinforce the conservative advantage in a polarized electorate.
2) As Mark Gersh showed in his recent Blueprint analysis of three key battleground states, the Kerry campaign hit virtually all of its own “mobilization” targets for Democratic voters. For the foreseeable future, and for a variety of reasons, Democrats cannot expect to regain the advantage we had in get-out-the-vote efforts up through 2000. And while it’s entirely possible to find fault with the Kerry campaign’s difficulties in presenting a sharp, compelling critique of the Bush administration (its strange refusal to criticize the Republican Party as a whole being exhibit A), I don’t think anybody could seriously argue that the Democratic base was poorly motivated in the end. Bush himself took care of that chore for us.
3) Despite its relative lack of attention to swing voters, the Bush campaign did indeed have a message for the country as a whole, and a strong, if often savage and dishonest, litany of abuse designed to raise doubts about Kerry as the alleged avatar of Northeastern Elitism and pre-Clinton liberalism. One way to “occupy the political center” is simply to push the other guy out by claiming he’s more extreme. The Bushies did an excellent job of doing just that, and in the absence of a clear and compelling positive message from Democrats, it was enough to tilt a close election to a weak incumbent.
4) It took the conservative movement 16 years after Goldwater to take over the Republican Party; and another 14 years after that to take over Congress. And the 2002-2004 elections represent the very first signs that they have achieved a real national majority–an incredibly tiny and fragile majority at that. This doesn’t strike me as an especially promising path for Democrats to take; we need to win immediately, not after some long period of ideologically rigid “movement-building,” because the damage the GOP will do to this country if given even a short period of dominance is horrifying.
For all these reasons, I think there’s a growing consensus among Democrats today that (a) mobilization of partisans and ideologues is not enough; we need a persuasion strategy as well; (b) we’re the out-party now, and no longer have any excuse for behaving as the Party of Government; (c) you just cannot win a presidential election without a clear, overarching message, defined as a theme or two that explain what you propose to do to organize public resources to address the needs and interests of the American people at home and abroad; and (d) that message must, for the foreseeable future, address the perceived weakness and incoherence of Democrats on national security issues; the perceived elitism and relativism of Democrats in terms of their understanding of the direction of American society and culture; and the perceived obsession of Democrats with a program-heavy, values-lite approach to economic and other domestic issues.
There’s plenty of room for argument about how to deal with all four of these lessons, but it’s useful to keep reminding ourselves that all four are at least as important as, and perhaps much more important than, the money and mechanics that political pros tend to favor as the solution to every problem.

Nothing, it seems, not even the Season of Peace and Good Will Towards Men, can evade today’s great secular idol, the conservative kulturkampf. Until I read E.J. Dionne’s column in today’s WaPo, I was only dimly aware of, and in some sort of unconscious mental triage had decided to ignore, the right-wing campaign to convince Christians there is some sort of conspiracy to deny them the right to celebrate their religious holiday.
Frankly, I don’t much care that Fox News types or conservative politicians are fishing in these religiously divisive waters. But it bugs me no end that (it appears) some Christian leaders and rank-and-file, at the very time of year when they ought to be pondering Christ’s gospel of humility and reconciliation, are instead posing as victims and demanding universal recognition of their faith.
Have Christians forgotten how many early martyrs died because of their refusal to pay homage to the “universal” religion of the Romans? And have Protestant Christians (who undoubtedly make up the vast majority of those upset at the resistance of Jews, Muslims, and the irreligious to the idea of demanding univeral acknowledgment of Christmas) forgotten that the imperial establishment of Christianity by Constantine was the beginning of what the Reformers considered the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church?
And speaking of the Reformers, have today’s heirs (including Presbyterians, and indirectly, Southern Baptists) of the Scots Reformer John Knox forgotten that official celebration of Christmas was actually banned in Scotland until well into the twentieth century, as a “pagan” feast?
I’m prejudiced on this subject, believing, as I do, that Knox might have been right for the wrong reasons: Christmas is spiritually dangerous not because it’s a holdover from “idolatrous” Roman Catholicism, but because it has become intimately associated with values–greed, commercialism, and insincere family conviviality–that have nothing to do with the Feast of the Nativity, and its profound underlying idea, the Incarnation.
The Incarnation is as radical, unsettling, and difficult an idea as ever, and Christians would do well to spend the season meditating on it, and respecting the Divine Image in everyone they meet. That approach is incompatible with a triumphalist demand that everyone they meet bend the knee to the questionable trappings of their holiday tradition, and even more incompatiable with the claim that Christians in a free country are being persecuted if they must suffer under the handicap of equality.

TAPPED’s Sam Rosenfeld noted that the President got a tad touchy during yesterday’s rambling press conference when he was questioned about the details and feasibility of his Social Security proposal. “I know what you’re trying to get me to do. You’re trying to get me to answer ‘Why this,’ ‘why that,’ to take positions — don’t bother to ask me.”
Geez, I thought it was Bush who had raised the whole subject, as the touchstone of his second-term domestic agenda and his bold, amazin’ plan to make this an “ownership society.”
But it’s typical of him to get exasperated when he’s asked to address any kind of policy details beyond the talking points he brings to the podium. It reminds me of a great Will Rogers story from World War I. At a time when German U-Boats were regularly sinking Allied shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, Rogers announced he had a solution: “Let’s just drain the Atlantic.” Asked how he would accomplish this bold stroke, he replied: “That is a detail, and I am not a detail man.”
That’s George W. Bush, all right. But Rogers didn’t fill the Atlantic; Bush has indeed deliberately engineered the fiscal crisis that makes his Social Security proposal so exceptionally dangerous and deceptive.

As the drumbeat of criticism of Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of Iraq spreads across party lines, his boss, George W. Bush, went out of his way at today’s snap press conference to defend Rummy’s heart. “I know Secretary Rumsfeld’s heart,” quoth he. “I know how much he cares for the troops.”
I know Bush was responding in part to unhappiness about Rumsfeld’s insensitive handling of a Q&A session with those troops he cares so much for, and to a new report that Rummy uses an autopen to sign condolence letters to the families of troops killed in the line of duty.
But still: this defense of Mr. Defense was off the mark. If we wanted a “sensitive” SecDef, there are, oh, about 250 million Americans who probably have better credentials than Donald Rumsfeld. He was hired because he’s supposedly a management wizard with exceptional knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the U.S. armed forces. And personally, I’d forgive him all sorts of “insensitivity” if he had proven himself competent to prosecute a war of choice and a post-war transition in Iraq.
But he hasn’t, and shows no signs that on-the-job training has improved his competence. His inveterate arrogance is dangerous not so much because he cannot put himself in the place of the men and women he’s placed in peril, but because, like his boss, he has an extraordinary inability to conduct a mid-course correction in his policies and practices.
My colleague The Moose nailed it yesterday when he compared Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamera, another management wizard who could not accept the evidence of his eyes that his state-of-the-art strategy for victory in Vietnam was failing.
I don’t personally care if Rumsfeld has a heart of stone. But his head of stone is another matter.

Okay, sports fans, my official, substantive response to David “Sirota’s Democrats’ DaVinci Code” is now up on the American Prospect site for your reading pleasure. The bottom line is (a) there’s no silver bullet for winning in “red states,” and if there was, it probably wouldn’t be “economic populism”; (b) “populist” means a whole lot of different things, mostly good, sometimes not so good, that cannot be conveyed simply by intoning the word; (c) demonizing “trade” without an alternative strategy for dealing with globalization is bad policy and questionable politics; and (d) abandoning Clinton’s political tradition is perilous if you want to win red states, since he did and his successors didn’t.

Since Matt Yglesias discharged the task of defending the DLC’s honor against the multiple calumnies hurled at us by David Sirota in recent weeks, I was able to send off on Friday a response to the substance, such as it is, of the “Democrats’ Da Vinci Code” article in The American Prospect that launched this silly food fight.
But there are two personal details that neither I nor Matt got around to mentioning, which require a response for the record.
The first is Mr. Sirota’s lead sentence in his piece in The Nation, which refers to Al From “looking out over Washington” from his “posh office.”
Actually, Al’s office looks out over a parking lot. And The Moose, who has worked for a wide variety of Washington organizations, including a couple of labor unions, assures me that Al From’s office is the least posh he has seen for any chief executive.
As a prominent member of the DLC’s corporate-funded Power Elite, I should mention that my own office is a rabbit warren constantly threatened with condemnation for Toxic Chaos, and for the loud, eccentric, and entirely non-corporate music I play after-hours.
And I take particular umbrage at the assertion Sirota made in his response to the NewDonkey post about his Prospect article, to the effect that I am a “DLC suit who’s never been outside the beltway.”
Excuse me. I have spent most of my life outside the beltway; spend every weekend outside the beltway; travel constantly outside the beltway; work for an organization whose main focus is outside the beltway; would never be described by my associates as “well-heeled,” or, on most days, as a “suit.”
People don’t always, or even often, match the stereotypes of people who don’t actually know them.
I learned that myself when I got down here to the country, and after feeding the livestock, got the internet access puffing and wheezing into life. I found a new email from David Sirota that informed us that he was off to get married, and thanked us for a “good debate.”
In my religion, the Sign of Peace trumps every dispute, because it’s the only way we can approach God together as people divided, but united in our common need.
I wish David Sirota and his spouse a blessed event and a wonderful honeymoon, and will include them in my prayers. And let’s all get a fresh start in the New Year, and argue, if we must, over things of real substance.