Which is it? Mine or Kos’? A reader comments:
It seems to me that while you and Markos both have deep issues with Hillary, you seem to see the problem with her candidacy in vastly different terms. Kos seems to believe (as do most leftists) that the Democrats do not need a centrist figure to win, but a base-rousing liberal (I’m betting Kos would love a Feingold candidacy). However you submit that "After the deep red-blue divides of the past decade and a half, a candidacy that would simply take those wounds and rub salt in them cannot be good for the country", which in my mind eliminates a left-winger.
Kos, and the liberal myth he espouses, sounds great if you occupy the left-wing (as Kos calls it the Jesse Jackson Democratic Party), but I’ve yet to see the electoral proof that such a campaign would win.
Kos and his ilk claim the Gore and Kerry losses augur for a liberal insurgency that will crystallize the left and bring millions of heretofore non-voters to the polls, galvanized not by policies themselves but stubborn adherence to those policies.
They continue to ignore the steady conservative movement of the last 40 years (perhaps they are too young to fully remember the Reagan revolution?) and overstate the meaning of the ‘netroots’ movement.
As a centrist Democrat I feel the party increasingly slipping over a precipice- or thanks to Kos and his friends perhaps pushed over a precipice would be more apt.
Maybe the solution is Mark Warner.
