The DLC gets tactical: if the Democrats win, it’s because of Dean’s 50-state strategy, because of insurgents like Tester in Montana, and because the electorate treated this as a parliamentary referendum on Bush. How weird to have increasingly irrelevant DLC Democrats trying to spin the victory as theirs. Joe Lieberman is not the future of the Democratic party. Being a Republican is not the future of the Democratic party. Populism — with a strong dash of social libertarianism — is much more likely to be the future of the Democratic party.
Brad DeLong has been reading the news and it makes him shrill. You will be too.
So far, I’ve spent the majority of this weekend asleep. I’ve been battling some sort of bug for well more than a week, and at best I was holding it to a draw. So this weekend I tried to sleep it off. When I do 14-hours of sleep in a day (two naps and a long night), that means not much blogging. So here are a collection of links to things that accumulated while I was in the land of nod.
One of the sleaziest strategies in this election has been the unsubtle use of the race card by the GOP in the Tennessee election. The Democratic candidate, Harold Ford, is black, his opponent is white, and time and again the Republicans have made a very big deal of Ford being around or dating white women. Thus, the big push early in the campaign about Ford being at some party (when single) that had (white!) Playboy bunnies. And national Republican party issued a press release about Ford having gone on a date with a (white) college sophomore when he was a single thirtysomething. The national Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has paid for an entire web site just to push the Ford and white women angle — while all the time saying it’s a “values” issue (that a single man went on dates?)
And now, the TV commercial — using at least some actors posing as voters — that really lays on the sleaze:
He sounds like David Duke, and he’s coming to a Republican Presidential primary near you. If there were any moderate Republican candidates, you might expect this guy to suck air out of the right and open a space for a centrist. But do they exist? (Cf. Sadly No reads LGF so you don’t have to.)
