Dem Candidates Sprinting to the Left

Powerline points us to two articles which they accurately describe as companions to one another. The first is from Nina Easton who discusses how the '08 Dem hopefuls are running to the left as quickly as they can:

Former senator John Edwards got high marks from labor for a new effort to unionize hotel workers, and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's demand this week that President Bush be censured was music to the ears of activists on the left.

Mark Warner, former Virginia governor, recently hired one of the leftist blogosphere's biggest names to run his Internet outreach campaign, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana began a blog on the liberal Huffington Post, peddling his foreign policy views.

The next round of prospective Democratic presidential candidates, even those with centrist credentials, is actively courting the Democratic Party's left wing -- which speaks loudly through its blogs, enjoys rising fund-raising clout built on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and is imbued with a confidence that it can build on Republican disarray. The Democrats are rushing to fill a void left in the hearts and minds of many liberal activists by New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's efforts to move to the center, particularly on the Iraq war.

And who are the lefties that the Dems are trying to appeal to? Dean Barnett answers that in his review of the book "Crashing the Gates":

JEROME ARMSTRONG AND MARKOS MOULITSAS are pioneers. Armstrong founded MyDD.com, arguably the first political blog of real prominence. As for Moulitsas, he's the founder and proprietor of Daily Kos, by far the most widely read of all political blogs. Pioneers they may be, but neither Armstrong nor Moulitsas has developed a reputation as a particularly skillful prose stylist.

Yet their new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, is a crisp and well-crafted work. The authors sharply diagnose the Democratic party's ills in a blunt and entertaining fashion.

Less impressive is the political philosophy they espouse. Crashing the Gate is a candid (indeed, shockingly candid) look into the morally vacant motivations of the movement that Moulitsas and Armstrong represent. In spite of confessing that the Democratic party stands for very little, Armstrong and Moulitsas fight for it passionately.

[...]

BUT THE MOST DISTURBING question raised by Crashing the Gate is if progressives don't know what they're fighting for, then why are they fighting so hard?

Crashing the Gate provides an invaluable snapshot of the Democratic party and the progressive movement circa 2006. Moulitsas and Armstrong are at the vanguard of the progressive movement, and even they don't know seem to know what it stands for.

What's interesting about this book is that despite having hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to the two lefty websites, an embarrassingly few books have actually been sold. I guess the folks that slobber over the daily dose of conspiracy theories and venom won't crack open their wallets to support the cause.