Ruy Teixeira, over at Donkey Rising points to some of his recent writings, that I'd rec. First, at Rolling Stone, A look at the numbers, what they really mean and what happens next, and second an article he wrote before the election, "Old Democrats and the Shock of the New (pdf)" (forthcoming in a Hoover Institution volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America, edited by Peter Berkowitz), that lays out the ways in which the Democratic party has evolved away from both Old and New Democrats.

I especially enjoyed the insight of the pdf excerpt from the Berkowitz book. It's the first frame of what's going on with the blogosphere, the new 527s, and Dean's candidadacy that puts it into a perspective that moves beyond a lot of the debate that occurs around Dean's potentially becoming the Chair of the DNC. For too long, we've seen the DLC centrists reach back to brand everything that's happened with Dean as more of the liberal McGovern-Mondale-Dukakis tradition that's lost, the press buys into it, and the wingers enable it gleefully. It's no longer going to work, it's time for a Newer Democrat to lead.