The Battle for the Best Deck Chairs on the Titanic--Updated!Howard Kurtz
covers the ongoing war among the Democrats.
The 2000 veep nominee, if you hadn't noticed, is drawing all kinds of flak from liberal activists, some of whom would like to sabotage his reelection bid (Lieberman's old nemesis Lowell Weicker is already making noises about running). But in a larger sense, the argument over Lieberman has become a proxy war for where Democrats should stand on the overriding issues of Iraq and terrorism. Which brings us to the editor of the New Republic versus Markos Moulitsas, properietor of the most popular liberal Web site.Good rundown of the Kos-Beinart (New Republic Editor) dust-up; just wish Howie would add a little of his own thinking to the piece.
I'll make no bones about it; Beinart's right and Kos is wrong. The problem with the current generation of Democrat activists is that they lack the institutional memory that Lieberman and others have. Kos, by his own accounts, wasn't even paying attention to politics in the 1980s when the Democrats began to realize that their leftist agenda wasn't selling and that they had to shift rightward if they hoped to win. Clinton showed it could be accomplished if you had a candidate who campaigned as a centrist (and
mostly governed as one).
Update: See also
John Ruberry's thoughts on this column.
