MODERATION VS. EXTREMISM, PART 4....One last post on moderation vs. extremism. I promise, no more after this, but I do want to clarify a few things:

• I've now voted in 14 national elections and I have yet to vote for anybody but a Democrat. (Well, there was that one vote for John Anderson in 1980, but that was it.) In other words, I obviously don't have any problem with thinking that the Democratic party itself is too extreme for my personal tastes. Quite the contrary.

• When it comes to extremism, liberals can't hold a candle to conservatives. The anti-gay bigotry of the Republican party alone is enough to make them unfit for civilized company.

• However, I understand that my views are not very common here in the land of the free these days, and I believe that as a matter of tactics we have to moderate our message and disassociate ourselves from the lefty fringe. In other words, we should love our lefty radicals in private but keep our distance in public, which is exactly what the Republicans do with their fringe. Once we're actually in office we can enact as much of the lefty agenda as we can get away with, but first we have to build our base of supporters and actually get in office.

  This is an old argument, of course, and I'm basically taking the Clinton/DLC side of things. The world is what it is, and while we should try to fight issues on our terms, we shouldn't commit electoral suicide to do it.

So that's it. Our current president, who very successfully ran as the equivalent of a DLC Republican, revealed himself as a radical conservative once he took office and is now engaged in a methodical and thoroughly determined effort to wreck our country. I don't want to give him four more years to do it, and if that means moderating our message and pandering a bit to some of those nervous suburban office park workers, then sign me up.

—Kevin Drum 8:44 AM Permalink | Trackbacks