Markos Moulitsas is hardly a household name but his DailyKos
website is well known to liberals far and wide. The diminutive Moulitsas is
essentially the Rush Limbaugh of the left.
So, in a long overdue piece, two centrists on Wednesday
blasted Moulitsas for his tea party-style efforts to impose a lefty litmus test
on all those associated with the Democratic Party.
Under the Politico headline, “Kos folds the big tent,” Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler, co-founders
of the Third Way think tank in Washington, shred a Moulitsas online rant in
which he joyfully envisions the day when all Democratic moderates are banished
from Congress.
Bennett
and Kessler, writing from the Democratic perspective, point out that purity
tests like those espoused by Moulitsas not only bring about election losses,
they would have prevented the passage of key pieces of legislation such as the
Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank crackdown on the big banks’ bonanza.
Moulitsas
happily (and foolishly) celebrates the loss of Senate moderates of the recent
past such as Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Fritz Hollings and Joe Lieberman. In other
words, the veteran Democratic workhorses of the Senate who knew how to
compromise and get things done.
The Blue
Dog Democrats, who numbered more than 50 just a few years ago, have been
retiring at a rapid clip and Moulitsas sees this as great progress because the
Democratic caucus is leaning further left than it has in decades.
But what can you expect from a guy who once threatened to
primary Dennis Kucinich, one of the most liberal members of Congress in recent
decades. If fringies like Moulitsas had their way, the Democratic Party would
march in lockstep, never giving an inch, and ensuring Capitol Hill gridlock for
years to come.
Bennett and Kessler denounce the DailyKos poster child for
openly cheering for losses in November of more moderates – Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana,
and apparently Mark Begich of Alaska and Kay Hagan of North Carolina too.
Here’s a portion of their piece:
“A charge implicit in the Moulitsas
post is that moderate Democrats lack political courage — that they would do
the right thing if only they were brave enough. This just doesn’t withstand
scrutiny. We actually sat in meetings with Senate moderates during the darkest
days of the ACA deliberations. They knew that voting for the bill could send
them to the Valley of the Doomed, and for many it did or still could. They put
their careers on the line and took that vote anyway—every single moderate named
in the (Moulitsas) piece who was still in the Senate voted for the ACA. So did
those unnamed, like Senators Begich and Hagan. That is political
courage.
“It was laudable, but hardly
courageous, for a Democrat from a Blue State to have voted for the ACA. The
last time a Democratic Senate incumbent lost in New York was 1899, and in
Massachusetts it was 1947. They don’t stare political death in the face on any
vote, ever. The moderates do.
“Moulitsas might have a stronger
case if the moderates he abhors were replaced by more liberal members. But
almost every instance saw the opposite result. Of the 10 former Democratic
senators that Moulitsas identifies, seven were replaced by Republicans, one by
Montanan John Walsh, who is in a fight for his political life this year, and
another by Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana, who is unlikely to make the
DailyKos Pantheon of Progressiveness. Just one, Joe Lieberman, of midnight-blue
Connecticut, was succeeded by someone to his left. Meanwhile, the moderate
Democrats in tough fights this cycle are running against Tea Party true
believers.”