Revenge of the irate moderates

I believe this is a historic first : I am calling an NYT editorial ... ahem ... brilliant.

[via Revenge of the Irate Moderates - New York Times]:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president's choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration's contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

The New York Times ought to extend the classification of irate democrats to many of the bloggers involved in getting the Lamont nomination in, and they ought to start from the top with DailyKos and his blogosphere.

Mainstream media has had a field day characterizing the Kososphere as lefty wing crazies and radicals but like my other friend Michael likes to say, for a bunch of former republicans one would be hard-pressed to find anybody who is a progressive or social libertarian.

Recognizing the political character of this insurgency is an important milestone for the people at the Grey Lady and mainstream media for one big reason : Democrats will not be able to win the White House in 2008 without Republican voters.

So if you haven't done it yet, it's time you find your political compass. I am a social libertarian which comes as no surprise.

When I decided to shift the focus of culturekitchen towards politics (this was in 2002), I did so out of the notion that the decline of personal libertarian values in American politics have taken us to extremely anti-democratic policies. Because the personal is political, I wanted to use the blog as a place to explore how this shift is not a consequence of politics but a cultural one powered by changes in American's day-to-day choices.

And since 2004, I've written about how the Democrats' biggest blunder was not to connect with the irate moderate Republicans who share many attributes with them but may diverge on issues like immigration, taxation and market regulation but not necessarily issues like abortion or equal opportunity laws.

This is why it's important for the lefty blogistan, especially the Kososphere, to reckon who they are at heart. Kos and his brigade know they are hardly the leftist nutjobs the MSM is making them out to be. Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers have spent a lot of digital ink over at MyDD explaining what they are not. What is different and definitely not moderate is their style, their rhetoric.

It goes to show how completely disconnected people in this country are from politics when rhetoric is confused with praxis. The stridency of the rhetoric of many liberal bloggers makes it easy to pin them as the electronic guerrillas they are not. Which is liberal bloggers need to tap into ire and make it more accessible to their republican counterparts.

If liberal and progressive bloggers want candidates like Lamont to win, we all will have to learn how to speak to Republicans, the irate moderate republicans who have been marooned since the extremists took over the Republican party. It may mean opening our front pages to politically marooned Republican bloggers and engaging them in discussions of agreement instead of discussions of dissent.

I've been thinking about this for a long time now and, honestly, would love to have angry Republican contributors at both The Daily Gotham and this blog. It's something I definitely would like to explore come this fall.

So if you know of any good Republican bloggers who are angry with their party, let me know of them. I'd love to give them a platform.

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