For me the Huffington Post is sort of like the People Magazine of the blogs. White hot production values, a few good op-eds, but mostly Democratic eye candy. I can't remember the last time I pointed to something written by Arianna Huffington and said, "Wow, people ought to read that." I am this morning. In this morning's editorial she examines "the fossilized thinking of Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report." Rothenberg is one of those dinosaurs who still thinks it is 2002, democrats should be timid, and the Democratic leadership played the Iraq funding bill just right. Huffington points out that
Rothenberg lauds the spineless positioning that led Democrats to defeat in 2000, 2002, and 2004: "The Democratic House and Senate leaders wisely played things safe by allowing a bill to pass that Bush could sign."While Arianna's dinosaur metaphor doesn't hold up, she is right on when she points out that Rothenberg's analysis overlooks the profound shift in the electorate that has occurred in the past years. As Blue Girl reported yesterday, rural America is no longer solidly Republican. It's their kids who are fighting and dying in Bush's vanity war. They have had it.
Huffington asked Dr. Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, and the author of The Political Brain for his take on the conventional wisdom reflected in Rothenberg's analysis. His response deserves to be repeated at length.
Behind Rothenberg's analysis -- like the analysis of the risk-averse pollster-consultants who have been running Democratic candidates into the electoral ground for a decade -- is the assumption that voters hear the words Democrats say but don't pick up the meta-message they're conveying with their actions: that they're too frightened to do and say what they believe. Democrats can tell voters that they're strong on national security, but the public can see with its own eyes what Dems do when confronted with aggression. If voters don't trust Democrats with national security, there's nothing the matter with Kansas. Kansans are seeing them clearly. They know cowardice when they see it. And Democrats have repeatedly displayed cowardice for a decade. The irony is that every time they haven't -- like when they started to challenge Bush on his equation of the Iraq War with the 'war on terror' -- the public has responded.Consider what Westen said. There is nothing wrong with Kansas. Kansans just don't like cowards. Democratic politicians are cowards. We don't need a new Kansas. We need new politicians, politicians who do what is right.
