Pelosi in my view treated the results of the 2004 election as a similar call for moderation of Democratic views which differ from the aparent election results, a presumption of support for Bush and his policies.

Roemer and his criticism that Democrats are intolerant on abortion.

Kerry and his view that Bush policies in Iraq should be continued and supported, rejecting the oppsition voices which question the Bush policies, Kennedy for one.

Feinstein speaking in support of C. Rice for Secretary of State, someone who lied repeatedly to the American people including lying to congression committies.

What have we democrats got from attempting to compromise with Bush and the GOP?

Are you able at this point to advocate at this point a tooth and nail fight against every element of the Bush agenda?

We need a persuasion strategy.   Persuasion.   We need to do 10 different things.  There is no strategic or tactical one-phrase cure-all.  ("More grassroots action!" "More passion!" "More Attacking!")  I'm worried you're just setting up another unproductive debate here.

And if you're going to talk about the middle in this way, you have to say who you think the middle is and what appeals to them.   You think there is NO middle?  That there's no difference among all the people who aren't partisan Republicans?  

Please, not another thread where people mindlessly say, "yeah, it's all this pandering to the middle that's killing us..."   No, it's that we don't have anything to say to the middle....or the left....or the right.   Yet.  

I also hardly think the dems went towards the center in 2004 when they chose Kerry as the final nominee. They knew what happens when you pick a MA liberal...during the primaries the republicans were practically salivating over this. But he was a war hero which was supposed to make him resist the whole Dukakis frame.

But I say we test this theory that the middle doesn't exist. I challenge the dems to nominate the most consistently liberal/progressive candidates they can muster and run them against the GOP, completely ignoring considerations of moderation because those votes apparently don't exist or are inconsequential. Let's see how it works in actual application.

Eisenhower had a 87% top tax bracket. Goldwater was against reducing the top tax rate from 70%. Nixon had a 70% top taxbracket. Jimmy Carter was considered a conservative Democrat when he ran. On economics, Bill Clinton was to the right of Barry Goldwater.

Democrats or Republicans are horribly and completely wrong and are harming this country.

I want to stand face to face with every Republican I know right now and talk to them about what is real and what is not. I want them to convince me that they are not crazy or accept that they are.

The middle has changed though and has not only shrunk. I think it has gotten stupider and less informed. The echo chambers on both the left and the right polarize the political cognizant middle of yester-year. What's left is the voters who are uninterested but go vote anyway. They vote with likeability being the most important factor. I think '08 is going to be another streetfight. Whoever does the best hatchet job on their opponent will win. Incumbency is much bigger now than it used to be.'

But what about the future?
If we grow liberalism, we win. We don't just win election with centrist Clintons. If we can get 8 more points of the electorate ideologically on our side, we can run whoever the fuck we want. As the middle shrinks, the stakes go up. Moderation is dead. If Republican can get 8 points of the country on their side, they will run whoever they want and win. Right now the stakes are high, and we're flipping coins. We won't be flipping a fair coin forever, if the middle stays like it is.

Bush, per the article, received the highest approval "thermometer rating" (84 vs. 80 for Clinton among Dems in 96 and 78 for Reagan among Repubs in 84) from his party in the 36 years of the poll and the lowest from his opposition party (29).  Kerry received normal ratings from Dems but ran well below McGovern among Repubs (32).  In short, we are about as divided as posible along the love/hate continuum.  Only 5% of the poll's sample was neither Repub nor Dem, not much room for the middle.

So if swing voters are a myth (the poll sees most Independents as either Dem leaners or Repub leaners), what drove the election?

Ruy Texeira says a lot of things.  A good portion of his article addresses what he sees as the group that swung the election: white women without a college degree.  (He calls them "working class" white women). The drop off here from the 2000 election for Dems was around 15 points for both married and single.  The group not only went with Bush on security issues but gave him a whopping 55-40 lead on his handling of the econony.

What's happening here?

If you want, you could also target Catholic voters who went for Protestant fundie Bush over altar boy Catholic Kerry by a whopping 2.5 million (the group broke even in Bush vs. Gore).

I'll tell ya, except for abortion, the Pope is way to the left of Kerry and probably about any American senator, governor, etc.

There may be a lot of overlap here in the 2 groups. But what in the world moved this group.  According to polling they moved late and they killed us.  Does anyone have some ideas how to move them back?
 

That's really sad - because the American politics became much more boring and much less interesting in the last 30-35 years..  Diversity is almost always good thing. But that's the fact..

On another side - about 40% of Americans call themselves a "moderates". These people can almost equally dislike Tom DeLay and Galvin Newsom (or even Nancy Pelosi), but they don't have real voice in any of 2 political parties.. They vote "holding their nose" either for liberal (more or less) Democrat or for conservative (more of less) Republican. Both parties generally don't want to accomodate these people and their views. Both are dominated by vociferous "activists". May be - it's a time to think about third party - but not in the far left or far right - in the "middle"...

Dean was never against the war on terrorism. He was against invading Iraq because he saw that it had nothing to do with the war on terrorism, and would do nothing but weaken the real fight we faced in places like Afghanistan.

Health Care is one area that proves the neo-con propaganda about support for religious social organizations is all BS. Religious groups built most of the hospitals in this country and managed them as non-profit organizations/charities. The religious hospitals were the health care safety net. Religious hospitals made sure people got needed health care. Religious health care organizations were run out of health care because people who had dollar signs  dancing in their eyes saw there was big money to be made in health care. There is no "safety net" in the health care system anymore because all these "compassionate conservatives" could make big profits by getting rid of the safety net. We may have no choice but to go to a government-based universal health care system because the far right destroyed the religious group non-profit health care safety net that had existed, and there's no framework to return to it. Health care is simply an area that society cannot afford to make big bucks. Nobody should make windfall profits on people's suffering.

We're pretty close in where we stand on the issues you listed. We simply are not moderates anymore.