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The Stakes

By Big Tent Democrat

By Big Tent Democrat

Kevin Drum writes:

Atrios:

The campaigns and candidates themselves may not get nasty, but I get the sense that supporters of the various candidates are getting angrier at the other camp. Sure a lot of this is just relatively harmless virtual world internet flaming, but it has real world manifestations too.

This has sort of taken me by surprise too. I'm reminded of the old saying that the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the battle. Obama and Clinton are obviously different in some important ways, but overall there just aren't any huge gaps between them, either in ideology or governing theory. . . . I confess that I have a hard time understanding the level of vitriol that the race has produced among supporters on both sides. . . .

Yep. On the flip, I will show you what I mean.

NOTE Comments closed.

Who s the DLC candidate? The DLC President Al From says it is Barack Obama:

What [Obama] has done is he has certainly taken a good part of the strategy we have articulated over the years,” Mr. From said. “Which is to not polarize, but try to unite and build a coalition that understands that a Democratic victory is a coalition.”

Mr. From said Mr. Obama had an intellectual, and not just tactical, connection to the D.L.C. “I mean his chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, is a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, which is our think tank,” he said.

Mr. From said that he would not be so presumptuous as to call Mr. Obama the purest D.L.C. politician out there. But he nevertheless believes Mr. Obama has adopted whole-cloth the approach to winning elections that he and his cohorts had long advocated. He said Mr. Obama belonged to the group that had, despite “all the screaming and yelling and the blogs,” chosen the D.L.C. approach to the more partisan beat-‘em-in-50-states philosophy advocated by Howard Dean.

“There has sort of been a choice in the Democratic Party politics, particularly in the last four or five years,” said Mr. From. “A lot of people think that the way the Democrats ought to operate is to mirror Karl Rove. Go off to the other side and hammer him. Just talk to the Democratic voters because there are more of them out there and they will put you over the top.

See the stakes?

Update (TL): Comments now closed.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).