Category: Pundits

Edwards Watch: Iffy. | No Gore ticket, period.

While Edwards donors have broken for Obama 2-1, current rumor has it that Edwards himself is inclined toward Clinton, mainly on account of his wife, Elizabeth. “‘She feels her husband should have been the man in the center of the presidential sweepstakes, rather than Obama,’ a source said.“

Well, if that’s true, it’s a remarkably petty reason to back the establishment candidate. Still, sour grapes or no, it’s hard to imagine Edwards coming out for Clinton at this late date anyway. Why would he obliterate all of his outsider-reformer cachet in one fell swoop, just to back a horse that’s already lost? If he endorses Clinton now, not only is his credibility in many circles effectively reduced to zero, but he’d be needlessly prolonging a primary battle that the rest of the party is trying to end ASAP. So, if anything, I expect he’ll remain neutral at this point.

Meanwhile, Al Gore reaffirmed he’s staying out of it for now, despite calls among some for him to break the deadlock: “‘What have we got, five months left?’ Gore told the Associated Press…’I think it’s going to resolve itself, but we’ll see.’” Well, it’s more like three months, if we go by the Dean standard. Still, I can’t say I’m surprised that Gore’s letting things shake out.

Which reminds me: There’s been some loose talk recently, most notably by TIME’s Joe Klein and Rep. Tim Mahoney, that the Dems could rally around Al Gore on top of a compromise ticket, a la John W. Davis in 1924. Now, maybe I’m in the minority these days in remembering that Al Gore was a thoroughly crappy candidate in 2000, one who — despite unprecedented economic good times — couldn’t even beat a congenial idiot like Dubya back in the day. Nonetheless, this notion of putting Al Gore atop the ticket is the Mother of all Dumb Ideas, redolent of the blatantly undemocratic, smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, and if it happens, I’m walking. In fact, I’d rather have Sen. Clinton be our standard-bearer than Al Gore: At least, she actually procured a sizable number of votes this cycle.

Recrimination Time.

“With a week to go before climactic tests in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign team has slipped into full recriminations mode. Looking backward, interviews with a cross-section of campaign aides and sympathetic outsiders suggest a team consumed with frustration and finger-pointing about the apparent failure of several recent tactical moves against Barack Obama. Looking forward, it is clear Clinton’s team has only a faint and highly improvisational strategy about what to do over the next seven days. Simply put, there is no secret weapon.” Politico’s Mike Allen and John F. Harris offer another dismal window into what looks to be the final days in Camp Clinton.

In related news, Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder — who, along with Politico’s Ben Smith and Salon’s Joan Walsh, has been one of the more obviously Clinton-leaning pundits in the paid blogosphere (nice work if you can get it) — pretty much gives up hope: “The ‘HRC can come back’ bandwagon is rolling through town, and I spent a long time yesterday contemplating whether to jump on board. But the platform on which her supporters stand right now seems more tenuous by the day…Advisers figure that a loss in Texas is as likely as a win in Ohio; a large number of staffers appear to be willing to quit en masse next Wednesday if there’s a split decision and Clinton gives notice that she intends to fight for another month.“

Update: Former Chief of Staff and long-time Clinton loyalist Leon Panetta gives his own post-mortem for the campaign, and puts the blame squarely on Mark Penn: “‘[Penn] is a political pollster from the past. I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,’ he said. He asserted that Mr. Penn ‘comes from an old school, like Karl Rove — it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.’“

The Sun Also Spins.

“For Simon, this dispute basically comes down to the complexity of urban problems. As he sees it, the ‘Philly model,’ imported to the Sun by Carroll and Marimow [re: Klebanow and Whiting], ignored the decades of economic, racial, political, and social disconnects underlying that complexity. When it spurred reform, it was reform that could not match the intransigence of the underlying patterns. The reporting itself was formidable, Simon says, but to him, homelessness, addiction, and violence aren’t the central problems. ‘Those are all the symptoms of the problem,’ he says. ‘You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that’s kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.’“

As The Wire 53 premieres on On Demand, some links on the journalistic controversies driving show creator David Simon’s animus this season. The CJR offered a long and interesting overview of the Simon v. Marimow/Carroll feud, and its partial roots in differing conceptions of urban journalism. An old 2000 City Paper piece suggests who Simon may have in mind in cub reporter Scott Templeton. And Simon himself recently discussed his old newsroom for Esquire, and got involved with Mark Bowden and Matt Yglesias over at The Atlantic. (Most links here via THND.)

Barack Obama and the Generation Gap.

(Obama silhouette pic via a friend/colleague at Peasants Under Glass, where we talked about some of the following in the comments.)

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Let’s go back a few days to Friday, just after Iowa, at the 100 Club Dinner in Milford, NH: “What you need to understand about the dinner and the venue is this: it was supposed to be a Clinton room.” The Clinton advance people had secured the best tables at the front, so all the formidable Granite State luminaries who’ve backed Hillary could show their strength, and show the Iowa upstart how things work in “independent” New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the Obama voters had been shunted to the back of the room, far away from the podium, the cameras, and the action. All well and good…except it didn’t work out that way. The legions of Obama voters surged to the front just before his speech and, by most accounts, blew the Clinton operation out of the room. “‘I’m really worried about him,’ said [Beverly] Hollingworth, a member of the state’s Executive Council and a former state senator, as she headed for the door. ‘Other people have been working their whole life for change, and have made good progress. This is just rhetoric.‘” And you know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mrs. Hollingworth?

Fast forward to this morning, where George Stephanopoulos held his usual This Week roundtable at the site of last night’s Manchester debate: Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Donna Brazile. For his part, Will seems to be among the “national greatness,” “Morning in America” civic conservatives — such as Peggy Noonan and particularly Andrew Sullivan — who’ve responded to Obama’s candidacy, and see elements of their beloved Reagan in his crossover appeal. (No doubt anti-Hillary schadenfreude is playing a considerable part too.) Brazile, who worked the comment desks at CNN on Iowa night, had already said her piece last Thursday, and didn’t add much this Sunday morning.

But those venerable dinosaurs of the Beltway punditariat, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, were virtually beside themselves that the Insider candidate seemed to be going down in flames, and soon proved themselves absurdly in the tank for Clinton. Cokie sneered at the constancy of Obama’s youth appeal: “Young people, as much as we’d like to see them active in politics, are notorious for not showing up when you need them.” She then went on to parrot Clinton’s most recent talking points. (Consider “It’s a lot of talk, when the reality is, change will happen,” or “She embodies change just by being the first woman who might be elected president.”)

Donaldson, meanwhile, got bogged down in a wish-fulfillment metaphor about the old champ wearing down the young hotshot (i.e. The Hustler, with Obama as Fast Eddie and Clinton as Minnesota Fats) and huffed and puffed with aggrieved authority, “I agree with Bill Richardson, experience is not a leper!…She’s the only one who brought up the economy, did you notice? Anyone could’ve said look, we may go into a recession here, there’s hard times. Only Senator Clinton — with her experience, if you will — managed to bring it up!” (You heard it here first, folks. Obama is too inexperienced to have considered the possibility of a recession.) “We’re always looking for the non-candidate, the non-politician, and we’d think that’d be great, Donaldson intoned. “But, George, when you have a toothache, most of the people here go to the dentist that’s drilled teeth for a long time, I think that’s where the country could turn out.” (Note here that it’s Edwards, not Obama, running the standard outsider-against-the-Washington-ramparts campaign that Donaldson is decrying.)

Now, on one hand, who cares what Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts think? Not only are they so completely invested in the Beltway power structure that it’s in their very marrow, but they’ve been living the sheltered life of the television Green Room for decades now. (So, it seems, has ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who showed last night during the Manchester debate that he thinks a two-academic family makes $200,000 a year. Uh, Charlie, try $3,000 a class.) As I know from considerable personal experience, the higher echelons in Washington invariably turn up their noses at candidates with outside-the-Beltway appeal, and tend to view them as interlopers worthy of ridicule (or, if they catch a spark, vitriol. At its most extreme, this is how you get Senator Clinton angrily exclaiming in 2000 that killing Ralph Nader “might not be a bad idea.”) In short, Sam and Cokie, like countless other members of the Washington media machine, see themselves as bastions of the Beltway order, keepers of the flame, and they don’t like any provincial outsiders upsetting the established status quo. All the more reason why Obama is causing them great consternation: “You’ve been with the professors and they all like your looks. With great lawyers, you have discussed lepers and crooks. You’ve been through all of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s books. You’re very well-read, it’s well known. But, something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is…“

On the other hand, if we peel away their affronted Beltway dismay about Obama’s upstart candidacy, Sam, Cokie, and Mrs. Holllingworth’s views speak to arguably the biggest open question about the Illinois Senator’s broad-based appeal, and the one demographic factor that most threatens his winning New Hampshire, and the nomination: the generation gap. Pulling up the Iowa numbers again: “Among all caucus-goers under age 45, a smashing 50 percent supported Obama, compared with just 17 percent for Edwards and 16 percent for Clinton. Among those under 30, Obama went even higher, to 57 percent. Among seniors, by contrast — nearly a quarter of participants — it was Clinton 45 percent, Edwards 22, Obama 18.” Obama pulled young voters out in droves in Iowa, and I think he shows every indication that he can do it again in New Hampshire and beyond. Still, as Cokie snarkily reminded us, older voters are consistent voters. And, allowing that individuals mostly defy easy groupings and follow the dictates of their conscience, the Boomers as a generation are clearly not sold on Obama just yet. So, what’s going on here?

Part of it, I think, was explained by Andrew Sullivan a few months ago in the Atlantic Monthly: “Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America — finally — past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us…If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.” Senator Obama has since furthered this line of argument himself, telling Newsweek‘s Joe Klein that he aims to move past “the dorm fights of the ’60s.” To younger voters, the culture wars that raged from the sixties to the nineties just don’t resonate. They seem like ancient history. To older voters, who lived through the experience and witnessed time and time again how low today’s GOP will sink in their pursuit of power, this past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

This is why, Sullivan continued in the Monthly, Clinton’s methodical (some might say calculating) persona and incrementalist approach doesn’t seem to rankle older voters nearly as much as it does those under 45. “[S]he has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.” To many older liberals and progressives, who’ve experienced one dismal setback after another since the heydays of the New Frontier and Great Society, the Clintonian brand of cautious pragmatism often seems the only viable approach to moving the country forward. Put simply, you get burned enough times, you stop using the stove. This time, irony isn’t the shackles of youth, but of their parents.

The sheer fact of Clinton and Obama’s presidential candidacies, I think, also plays a part in the wide generation gap. The great liberal and progressive victory of the Boomers, one that merits them the moniker “greatest generation” just as readily as fighting WWII does their parents, is the sweeping and (for the most part) successful cultural transformation of race and gender in American life. This is not to say that racism and sexism don’t continue to fester in America, both individually and institutionally — Of course they do, and they’re all the harder to root out for having gone underground. But, thanks to the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, younger people tend to view race, gender, and other issues of identity as much more fluid concepts than most Boomers do. While many older voters still possess vividly etched memories of separate drinking fountains, grotesque sexism in the workplace, and fire hoses trained on children, Generations X, Y, and Z grew up sharing a multiracial consumer culture of MTV, The Cosby Show, hip-hop, Tiger Woods, Eminem, etc. Similarly, I think it’s safe to say that people under 50 are much more likely to have had a female boss at one point or another. (Counting ’em up, I’ve worked under more women than men, and I doubt I’m in a slim minority on that point.)

Put simply, and while being careful not to overstate the case, categories like race and sex just don’t seem as defining to the youth of today. Boomers fashioned this new world through blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice, but — like Moses at the Promised Land — they can’t enter it as readily as their children and grandchildren. This is part of the reason, I think, why, anecdotally speaking, older columnists seemed so much more taken aback by Obama’s victory in lily-white Iowa. This also partly explains why Clinton seems to enjoy the strong support of older women. They remember a considerably lower and less permeable glass ceiling — and the considerable struggle it required to break it — while many younger women seem to more readily presume (as I do) that sex isn’t really a barrier to the presidency anymore.

Now, the response to an older Clinton voter to all of these arguments thus far might be something along the lines of “Just you wait…We know better than you, sonny. Obama may seem like a rock star, but we can see there’s no substance to him.” But, it doesn’t do any dishonor to older voters to suggest in return that maybe this is the moment to forsake a lifetime of dashed hopes and bet on the possibility that the time for a new, expanded progressive coalition has finally come. This is not an easy thing to do. As accomplished and dedicated a reformer as Jane Addams, part of a progressive generation for which I have great empathy, couldn’t bring herself to vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and she was not alone.

Still, there’s something strikingly dismaying about watching Clinton and other members of her generation dismiss Obama’s message as merely “false hope” (a particularly vicious phrasing) and empty rhetoric. This is the same generation who recoiled from the tested, experienced establishment candidate in 1960, despite his considerable national security credentials, and flocked to the young, hopeful standard of Camelot. This is the same generation who, buoyed by the words of Dr. King, swelled the ranks of the civil rights movement, and who — disgusted by the continuance of a badly thought-out war overseas — was inspired by the moving oratory and surprising crossover appeal of Robert Kennedy.

Those leaders were all tragically taken from us, of course, two of them forty years ago this spring and summer. It’s maddening to think of how the past four decades might’ve played out had we the opportunity of their continuing leadership and inspiration. And it’s been a long time, far too long, since we’ve seen anyone on the left who can be mentioned in the same breath as those fallen leaders without hyperbole. But, look at those Iowa numbers again. Maybe, just maybe, that wheel has finally come full circle. Maybe, Senator Barack Hussein Obama is the real deal. Maybe he’s the candidate who can transcend the sad political paradigm we’ve been operating under since 1980 and bring about that long overdue progressive realignment. We’ve only seen one caucus, of course, but the game moves fast in 2008, and all the indicators seem to suggest he’s got “it.” If you’re not going to stake a chance on him now, what, then, are you waiting for?

I started this entry with a Bob Dylan song. I’ll end with another, one I listened to on Friday for the 1,000th time and “heard” like it’s the first time. (It sounds completely different when unburdened for a few moments by the ironic punchline of the years after 1968.) If it seems like GitM has become all-Obama, all-the-time since last Thursday, well, there’s a good reason for it. Right now, I truly believe we’re standing at a crossroads moment, one that could all too easily become evanescent, another missed opportunity in a political lifetime that doesn’t offer many of them. But if, on Tuesday, New Hampshire nurtures the spark set in Iowa last week, and Nevada and South Carolina kindle the blaze, we could be looking at a full-fledged progressive wildfire across the nation come SuperduperTuesday. So, to the older voters — and to any voters — who, for whatever reason, may be harboring doubts about Barack Obama, give him another look. We’re at the first hinge of 2008, and what we do in the next few days and weeks will echo profoundly throughout the next several years of our governance. The old road is rapidly agin’, y’all. So please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times, they could be a-changin’.

Debate and Digression.

Well, it may seem like they’ve been going at it for awhile now…nevertheless, the first official Democratic primary debate was held last night, co-sponsored by the good folks at CNN and YouTube. [Transcript.] (As you likely heard, this gimmick this time was that the questions were submitted by Youtube users the nation over. All in all, they turned out to be a mixed bag, but no more or less cutting than the ones usually conjured up by George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, or some other venerable talking head of the moment. Still, not a single query on campaign finance reform managed to sneak through the vetters…so now, I kinda wish I had at least tried to submit one.)

And the verdict this time? Well, no one broke out of the pack as a result of their performance last night, which — the talking heads tell me (hey, David Gergen’s gotta eat) — means a win for Clinton. But, as with the past few debates, I still find my position further solidifying in favor of Obama and Edwards, and against the Senator from New York. (My reasons have been put forth previously here and here.) In fact, the most irritating moment of the debate for me, and I’ll admit that this’ll be considered well beyond stupid and pedantic to most people, was Senator Clinton’s butchering of the distinction between “liberal” and “progressive” to contort her way out of having to name herself the former. For what it’s worth, the key element of a turn-of-the-century progressive was never “someone who believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms” — that would be a liberal. Indeed, arguably the major flaw in the progressive movement — until after WWI — was its inattentiveness to individual rights and freedoms…hence, Prohibition, or, to take an even more sordid example, the proliferation of Jim Crow in the South.

But, more importantly, and this is what really irked me, Hillary Clinton has proven herself to be the least progressive of the Democratic candidates, in that she’s been the most willing to get into bed with corporate interests time and time again. (And, for you historians reading this, yes, I’m calling shenanigans on Kolko.)

Ok, I’ll concede, Clinton can’t honestly be expected to deliver a comprehensive historical disquisition about liberalism v. progressivism in a 45-second debate answer. But, please don’t chalk up my concern simply to being an aggrieved aspiring egghead just yet. (And, hey, speaking of parochial, Obama mentioned my hometown, Florence, SC, tonight, albeit not in a positive light. But I digress again.) The fact is, the differences between liberalism and progressivism do matter, particularly when you consider [a] how often politicians in our party seem confused, or even ignorant, about the Left’s guiding political philosophies these days, and [b] how different a truly progressive presidential candidate would seem from what Hillary Clinton has yet offered us.

Most importantly, a true “modern progressive” would push campaign finance reform, ethics in government, and voting reform though the heavens fall. These are hardly central tenets of the Clinton campaign, to say the least. And, along with the obvious necessities of a sane, competent, foreign policy, accessible, affordable health care, and comprehensively reworked environmental and energy plans, a real “modern progressive” would also extol education, civics reform, universal (if not mandatory) service, community-building, a vast increase in arts and science funding, an end to child poverty…all ways to help renew the bonds of citizenship, to help encourage an active, engaged, self-governing electorate, and to help foster a new generation of Americans more attuned and responsive to the concerns of their fellow men and women — here and around the globe — than they are to the self-absorbed and increasingly inescapable dictates of rapacious consumerism and the corporate bottom line.

It’s late, and I’ve clearly started soapboxing. Still, what I wrote back in 2000 here, before I came to Columbia, still holds: “I know it all sounds a bit academic and removed from reality, but, what can I say? This is where my idealism (or what vestiges of it that survive this election cycle) lies.” Well, it’s been a few election cycles since then, and in many other ways the years since have not been kind, in terms of progressivism or otherwise. I’d very much like to continue indulging in “the audacity of hope” when it comes to such matters — I know it’s way early in the game, and that we’re probably still at least a good 3 or 4 “Macaca moments” out before this all gets decided. But increasingly, and particularly after listening to these debates thus far and the virtual Clinton coronation by the talking heads thereafter, other quotes often come to mind as well. For example: “Look for your friends, but do not trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands.”

I’m not saying Clinton would make a terrible president — Obviously, she’d be much better than the current fiasco of an administration. (But, as always, who wouldn’t be?) But I do increasingly fear her tenure — if it’s marked by the same confused, wishy-washy and corporate-friendly Republican-lite “centrism” her campaign and the DLC have pushed in the past — will make for yet another missed opportunity in terms of fostering real progressive change in this country. (And Senator Clinton, to get to the point: I know progressives. I’ve spent the past six years and change studying progressives. And, you, Madam, have been no progressive.)

The Alan Colmes Project.

“It sounds harsh, but think of most of the Fox Democrats, at least those who appear on the opinion shows, which take up half the network’s airtime, as one of three types. They are either scary liberals, losers or enablers. Representatives of each type may score some points for Democrats when they appear on-air, but ultimately they help further Fox’s larger narrative about Democrats and liberals and what they stand for.” Also in Salon, Alex Koppelman takes a gander at FOX News’s usual go-to stable of kept Dems.

A Libby Alibi?

As Scooter Libby’s defense begins in Washington, a slew of reporters — including Bob Woodward, Bob Novak, and Evan Thomas — testify that Libby was not their source in the Plamegate fiasco, with Novak pinning the onus on Karl Rove (and the previously-outed Richard Armitage.) Hmm. Good to know, but whether Libby was the only White House official throwing around Wilson’s name or merely one of a team of Dubya flaks doing the same seems incidental to the question of whether he perjured himself.

Full Slate.

“Where is the analyst at a firm called Forrester Research who used to be quoted everywhere calling us, witlessly, ‘the Slatanic’? Haven’t heard much from him lately.” A happy 10th anniversary to Michael Kinsley’s Slate, home to Dahlia Lithwick, Fred Kaplan, Seth Stevenson, and several other writers and journalists invariably worth checking out.

Coming In from the Cold (War).

“[F]or all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme.” In keeping with the intellectual territory he staked out after the 2004 election, former TNR editor Peter Beinart makes the case for a return to Cold War liberalism in a NYT excerpt of his new book, The Good Fight (also discussed in the recent Atlantic Monthly.)

I couldn’t agree more with Beinart’s paragraph above, but I don’t think the lack of a sufficiently robust national security emphasis is really the defining element missing among today’s Dems. Are there really Democrats out there who don’t agree with Beinart’s three main assessments here, that (a) America faces a real enemy in Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist terror networks, (b) our foreign policy should be less hubristic and more attuned to both local contingency and international institutions, and (c) our national sense of self should emphasize our own fallibility at times? Beinart would probably target the MoveOn crowd, but as Eric Alterman noted in the last round of this back-and-forth, that’s just a DLC straw man, roughly akin to Joe Klein’s cadre of phantom lefty consultants in the last update.

Plus, I think there are two significant historical problems with the Cold War liberalism Beinart unreservedly espouses, which he fails to discuss here. For one, Cold War liberals could very easily be seen as best inattentive to and — at worst complicit in — the excesses of McCarthyism. If the enemy abroad becomes the central defining focus of your national narrative, then the enemy within is undoubtedly going to start eating at you as well. For another, (and as John Gaddis, among others, has pointed out) — for all its early sense of diplomatic complexity and limited, realistic goals — the Cold War liberalism Beinart promotes all too readily (d)evolved into the guiding rationale for wildly wrongheaded foreign policy interventions, most notably in Vietnam. (You’d think Beinart would pay more lip service to this issue, particularly as he himself made much the same mistake in shilling for the Iraq war in The New Republic.)

In short, I agree with Beinart’s assessment that the Dems lack a sense of usable past, but the problems with his argument can be encapsulated by his ideal of a what a good, hawkish, Cold War liberal Democrat should look like these days: That, if Beinart’s tenure at TNR is any indication, would be Joe Lieberman, a politician who’s not only been flagrantly cheerleading for the administration during the current war, but has exhibited little interest in today’s wartime civil liberties issues. Simply put, Joe Lieberman would hardly be my choice of template for the Democratic party. (Who would? That’s easy: Russ Feingold, who’s displayed a strong commitment to preserving both national security and civil liberties at home, while arguing for a more level-headed, less-in-your-face American foreign policy.)

Bleeding Turnip (Day.)

“Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well — according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants.” By way of Ted at The Late Adopter, Thomas Frank of What’s the Matter with Kansas? eviscerates Joe Klein’s new book Politics Lost. I liked the TIME excerpt decently enough, but Frank pretty much takes the book apart here.