Salon's Michelle Goldberg does a really nice analysis of the feud within the Dem party between Deans/Greens and the DLC called "The Democrats' brewing civil war."

Of course the DLC is shouting McGovern! McGovern! McGovern!, but the piece points out that Dean is the most fiscally conservative of the nine.

It's not mostly about Dean per se--though he may well carry the banner for one side this time--it's about the two competing notions of what the Dems need to win: appeal to the middle, or stand for their convictions.

Great passage here:

No one really represents liberals, which many of them find intolerable. That's why there was an exodus to the Green Party, and that's why there's now so much talk among leftish Democrats of "taking back" the party. Even if Dean doesn't share all their views, he courts liberals rather than trying to marginalize them.

While the DLC sees the ghost of McGovern in this strategy, liberals have a different analogy -- Ronald Reagan.

"Elections create what is acceptable or what is the center," says Borosage. "When Ronald Reagan started running in 1980, he was widely dismissed even among Republicans as a nutcase. But he changed politics in America and created the conservative era we've been living in ever since. I don't think these things are a given. They are forged. The DLC tends to think polls are written in stone and people have specific ideas that can't be overcome."

That's certainly how I remember it. The notion that voters are sitting in one place, just waiting for some candidate to join them there and parrot back what they're thinking just doesn't jibe with the human behavior I've witnessed. There's a reason they call the president a leader. People really do hunger for someone to lead them, and when the right person comes along with the spark that inspires people, you'd be shocked where they will follow. It's always been more about the man--and someday hopefully woman--than the issues. That's exactly what I argued in my piece predicting Dean would win the nom on June 30th. And a bit more on it here as well.

(And speaking of women leaders, Maggie was way more conservative than the Brit population, but she drove them places they hadn't even thought about for a hundred years. We could use an Iron Lady on our side.)

Then there's the view that that shift can happen, but it takes a decade or two to build it:

Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Institute, actually agrees with parts of Borosage's analysis.

In the short run, he says, liberal rage is good news for Bush. "In the long run it may not be bad news for Bush," Franc says, "but it might be bad news for a successor. The [Democratic] Party, in order to realign itself in the right direction, may need to undergo some self-examination and a reorientation of what it's all about. Republicans reacted very, very well to their 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater by an enormous margin, Goldwater had more people out on the streets working for him. It was an early indication of a nascent conservative resurgence that was possible with right kind of nurturing and direction.

"This conservative movement really grew out of that," he continues. "It took a while -- first we had Nixon to deal with -- but it finally led to Reagan's election in 1980. There was kind of a 16-year walk in the wilderness, where people who worked on the Goldwater campaign hung together and formed organizations, formed magazines and journals and helped develop foundations for what was to come."

I think there's something to that as well. Those conservative have definitely gotten the upper hand on getting their message out. They built an amazing machine, very different than anything we've seen before. I'm actually not certain how much a hand it played in getting Reagan elected, but it's sure been dominant ever since. Listen to Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who never came close to having the charisma to lead the country personally, but always impresses me with his ideas. He'd be a great chief strategist for a charismatic man who can carry the banner to victory:

"The typical American shares the values of most liberal activists and progressives," says Reich, "but the typical American has been fed a nonstop diet of lies and angry, snide, resentful, bitter diatribes by right-wing radio talk-show hosts and right-wing TV talk-show hosts. The typical American doesn't know what the facts are. He believes that the typical family is getting a $1,000 tax cut. He believes Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for 9/11. He doesn't know that Afghanistan is falling apart, he doesn't know that we're completely unprepared for a terrorist attack. He hasn't been told that most of the corporate scandals of 2002 could happen again because most of the legislation never went anywhere."

All very sad, but all very true. Kind of amazes me to hear a lot of people conceding the election to Bush already. He's really botched all the major challenges facing the country. The nation inevitably rallied around him when 9/11 scared the crap out of us and some people feel he was a good leader in the moment (though he still made my skin crawl). But he rolled into Afghanistan and did a great job in the short run, then promptly made the exact same mistake there we did the last time. That place is going to blow up on us again, and Iraq is going to be worse when it finally holds an election and ushers in a Shia regime that hates us. Neither will probably won't happen under his watch, but it doesn't seem too hard make people aware of how he badly he's bungled it. You just need the right voice to get that message out. And the courage to say it. 

Bush is incredibly vulnerable, I think, but only to someone who can exploit his catastrophic weaknesses, both foreign and domestic. The Dems are so focused on finding the right spot on the policy spectrum, when what they really need is to find the strong man or woman who can articulate their message, expose Bush's weaknesses and leave him gasping for political air.