February 3, 2006
In Praise of Kos
By BulldogPundit
It is finally dawning on many people what we've been telling you for over a year: when it comes to the Democrat party, the white mice are running the lab. And guess who's finally figured that out? The head mouse himself, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, also known as Kos.Kos made a very perceptive observation yesterday in the wake of the Alito loss (which proves the adage about blind squirrels and nuts). But the bad news for Democrats is that he was so correct in his analysis.
In a relatively sane post-mortem analysis on his party's failure to stop Judge Alito (well, except for the part where he said the GOP was trying to take the country back to the 18th century), Kos wrote:
What you guys accomplished the last week was amazing -- the outpouring of emails, letters, faxes, and phone calls was unprecedented for the netroots and particularly surprising given how weak our issue groups organized against Alito.
We should've played a supporting role to strong efforts by NARAL, People for the American Way, and others. Instead, we ended up being pretty much the entire effort.
But say what you will about blogs and the netroots, we are not effective organizers for this type of large-scale effort, with an opposition wielding tens of millions of dollars. That we got this much accomplished in the fact of that is simply incredible.
So we are now on the map. The Alito vote may have fizzled, but you better believe the Dem establishment knows we exist.
Kos was absolutely correct in crediting the true believers on his site with ensuring that a filibuster was attempted. He's also correct that it was his readers and those like them on other far-left websites that did the "heavy lifting" to get the filibuster vote, and that well known front-groups like PFAW and NARAL failed miserably in their attempts to get some Democrats to take a stand.
Do you honestly think there would have been any filibuster without the constant faxes, phone calls and emails the Kos kids and other like minded lefties placed to the Democrat Senators? I sure don't.
Most telling is that not one of the potential 2008 Democrat Presidential hopefuls dared to vote for cloture. Bayh, Clinton, Biden, Feingold and Kerry all went down with the ship. You have to ask yourself why that happened. I submit that it's because the Kos and Atrios crowds put all Democrats on notice that a vote against cloture was a litmus test that had to be passed. Clearly, all the Democrat Presidential hopefuls did the political calculus and came to the conclusion that a vote for cloture was akin to political suicide, which goes to show you who the real kingmakers are for the Democrats these days.
In a way, what Kos has done to the Democrat party is a good thing and is admirable. The tail shouldn't wag the dog. And they are rightly telling the people that run for their nomination that if you want our money, you will toe the line. (Republican activists are trying to tell the leadership much the same thing on the issue of immigration.) But for the Democrats this is a double-edged sword, and one that's going to chop their heads off.
Why? Because in being forced to pander to the true believers they have to take positions that the rest of the country rejects. Kos and MoveOn.org can say they're in the "mainstream" till they're blue in the face, but election results (the only thing that matter) say exactly the opposite.
Think about this: let's say NARAL and PFAW had done all that Kos and the rest wanted them to do. How many more cloture votes would they have gotten? Maybe 5 at best? Kos made the correct observation that there was no way the red-state Dems were going to vote against allowing a vote on Alito because they'd have been thrown out by their conservative constituency come next election. Which is another part of the problem - outside of the coasts, Michigan and Illinois, a Democrat can't afford to drink the Kos Kool Aid.
What they also fail to realize is that the reason they didn't stop Judge Alito was not because of what the PFAW, NARAL, or the Senators did or didn't do. It was because of their message. For all the energy and passion the far-left “netroots” community brought to this fight (and to ignore that they were indeed a big factor is to be blind to reality) they are incredibly tone-deaf to the fact the majority of Americans just don't agree with them.
Some Democrats say that what the next Presidential nominee must do is have a "Sister Souljah" moment with the far-left internet crowd, just to prove they’re not going to be captive to that particular brand of lunacy.
The only problem there is that in 1992 many in the party, especially the old Reagan Democrats, agreed with Clinton's sentiments when he called out Sister Souljah. But it's not 1992 anymore. Any Democrat who takes on this bunch will find him or herself short on funds but loaded with vitriolic insults coming their way. Think I'm crazy? Ask Joe Lieberman how quickly that worm turned for him.
Ironically, the ultimate beneficiary of this anger will be the Republicans. By purging all the sane members of their party, the Kos Kids have pretty much ensured a long time in the political wilderness.
But you know what? The country is strongest when it has two SANE political parties competing in the arena of ideas. And as the far left has begun to dominate the Democratic Party, we're increasingly one short. And no, for all its faults, it's not the GOP.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-2_1_06_BDP.html