50-State Radicalism?

I have no fondness for Markos Moulitsas, but he's a particularly bothersome person when it comes to his pure arrogance.

Check it out for yourself in his self-aggrandising post, "From Scream to 50-State Deam" (on DNC Chair Howard Dean's previously-dismissed 50-state electoral strategy):

I keep saying it since I doubt people believe me - when we were agitating for the 50-state strategy in 2003, 2004, and 2005, it was hugely controversial. Crashing the Gate may seem like a fairly conventional book today, but when Jerome and I wrote it in 2006, it was mocked as crazy talk. Funny how two years and a little success completely changed everything.

And here's one lagging piece of CW that still gets it wrong:

[Dean is] usually associated with the loony wing of the party, the MoveOn crowd and the liberal bloggers. But in reality, he had a vision for Democrats capturing the center, and it’s coming to pass.

Ah yes, us loony bloggers, fighting for universal health care, to protect social security, to keep our government from unconstitutionally spying on us, and to promote a sane foreign policy that doesn't unnecessarily cost us blood and treasure. You know, loony things supported by a majority of the (apparently also loony) American people.

Here's what too many people still don't understand - there's nothing loony about the netroots. This isn't fertile territory for the McKinneys and Kuciniches of our party. This is fertile territory for the Howard Deans of our party - sensible, pragmatic progressives who aren't afraid to be Democrats. Why? Because we're the nation. We're not clustered in DC and NYC, we're spread out over all 50 states, and we know better than anyone what it takes to win in our own backyards.

Actually, Cynthia McKinney's no longer a Democrat, and Kucinich's views on the issue of Iraq better mirror those of the Kos "nation" than do Barack Obama's, oddly enough.

But beyond Kos' imprecision and hypocrisy, I'm more interested in this part about how the Kos "nation" promotes all these "not-so-looney" policies, like the following?

Barack Obama - who has welcomed the support and has even openly cooperated with Daily Kos - is ... well outside the mainstream of the American political culture, and an Obama administration will push an extreme-liberal policy agenda of tax hikes, spending windfalls, economic stimulus, spread-the-wealth redistributionism, universal health care, infrastructure investment, fairness doctrine, global warming legislation, restrictions on gun rights, abortion on demand, embryonic stem cells, foreign importation of prescription drugs, union card-check voting, trade protectionism, precipitous Iraq withdrawal, ban on domestic wiretapping, opposition to mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, sex-education for kindergartners, race-based affirmative action, expanded welfare entitlements, radical education pedagogy, and enemy appeasement diplomacy with no preconditions (and more).

I don't think these are the policies likely to be favored by some mythical 50-state Democratic coalition.

Ronald Reagan took 49 states and 525 Electoral College votes in 1984. Richard Nixon won 49 states and 520 Electoral College votes in 1972.

The Republicans could legitimately claim to represent the "nation" on the basis of these overwhelming electoral landslides. At present, Barack Obama comes nowwhere near the dominating territory of earlier GOP earthquakes.

Markos Moulitisas is arrogant and power-hungry, and extremely over-confident.

An Obama victory will mostly reflect a repudiation of the current business cycle and the bipartisan governmental mismanagement of the last few years. The country remains center-right, and the more attention that Kos and his radical Democrats get, the more likely it will stay that way.