Eleanor Clift Is NutsOh, I recognized it years ago with her absurd performances on the McLaughlin Group, but then a funny thing happened. I borrowed a book from the library called War Without Bloodshed, written by Eleanor and her late husband, Tom Brazaitis. And it was a terrific political primer on the political world as it existed in 1993. It even had a plot (the HillaryCare debacle) where the good guys win out in the end.
Since then I've always had a grudging respect for her. But
this column definitely used up a lot of that respect. Clift gives a completely trite and naive spin on the special election held last week in Ohio's second district, that comes straight from the Kos's mouth.
The national Democratic Party had written off the Ohio seat because the district is the second-most Republican in the state, but Moulitsas and like-minded bloggers saw it as a chance to put everything they’d been saying to the test. They didn’t expect to win, though there was always that hope, but if they could turn a foregone Republican conclusion into a close race where the GOP had to spend money and sweat the outcome, that would be victory enough.Goalpost shifting? I read a fair number of the left-wing blogs the week before the election, and I don't remember anybody over there saying that "We won't win, but let's at least keep it close."
So the left-wing blogs are now the toast of Eleanor Clift, and Kos gets a write-up we might expect from a lovesick sixteen-year-old girl:
The boyishly slight Moulitsas responded with an engaging smile, saying that he wished he could claim he was a grand visionary and that his blog was part of a master plan to take over the world. He had no idea it would take off the way it has. It was his way of dealing with the angst he felt as an Army veteran who opposed the Iraq war at a time when any disagreement with President Bush was thought to be almost treasonous. Moulitsas is no stranger to war. He had spent part of his youth in El Salvador, his mother’s native land, during that country’s brutal civil war. Back home in Chicago, he enlisted in the Army at age 17 and spent two and a half years with an artillery unit in Germany. After college and law school, he ended up designing Web pages in San Francisco. He supported the bombing in Afghanistan but was so viscerally opposed to the invasion of Iraq that he was driving his wife and boss and cubicle mate crazy, he recalls. “It was either start a blog and just vent or lose my entire social circle,” he said. Pretty soon he had 100 online visitors, more than he could accommodate in his house, he remembers thinking. When he hit 1,000, he thought to himself, “I’m done,” but he kept going--and now he’s Moses leading Democrats to the promised land.I have a hunch that the promised land for the Democrats is a long way off if Kos is Moses.
