I guess that’s where we disagree. Biden, for instance, is a wholly owned subsidiary of MBNA. He’s a senior Democratic senator. In reality, he’s the same as a Republican corporate whore, just without all the superstitious and jingoistic accessorizing.

Yes, the Demo-whores would’ve gone after the Republi-whores, and we would all make popcorn and have great fun watching it, but what would really result?

They all swim in the same sewer: money = speech, therefore policy = a commodity. The rest is just advertising. Until the DNC has been wrested from the clutches of the DLC, there are too many Democrats who are as bought and paid for as the whole GOP.
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Like hell it doesn’t matter. Bush, Cheney and co. would have probably been impeached by now for a range of scandals if the congressional committees were controlled by his opponents rather than his friends. And on policy, being both over-cautious and beholden to a wide range of interest groups is far preferable to being crazily wrong and being beholden to a small set of interest groups.

Crooked Timber argues that Republicans have blacklash insurance:

I honestly don’t see Miers making much sense across the board. It’s understandable that the right doesn’t like her. It’s understandable that the left doesn’t like her. I just don’t follow the thinking that the center does. She seems to have little to offer.

Regarding the candidates Democrats offer though, I tend to agree. I think in last years election Bush was amazingly week. It took a candidate like Kerry to lose. Exactly why Democrats do this honestly escapes me.

Sure, but how ? To get any power in the current GOP
you need the support of either big business or
the religious right, and preferably both.
To make the GOP more moderate on social policy
you have to fight the religious right; to make the
GOP more moderate on economic issues you have to
fight big business. The views of GOP voters just
don’t make any difference, unless and until enough
of them switch to the Dems.

Anyone wonder why Bush barely won Ohio, where Dems haven’t won anything in more than a decade?

There is plenty of economic disenchantment but running Kerry (with Theresa and a Gulfstream) didn’t do the job (plus the campaign was a Bob Shrum cluster-mess).

Unless the Dems can build a bridge to the pro-life blue collar vote, the Red states will stay Red. The only other hope is that Bush continues to break everything he touches.

The Dems also hurt themselves when they come up with lame crap like “there is no problem with Social Security.”

Now, let’s grant for a moment that the Dems are the less corrupt and more progressive party—which I doubt. Still, this should pose some big questions for progressives who want to create some automatic identity between liberalism and voting Democratic. If liberalism really is a position about what government should and shouldn’t do, the obvious task is not to vote suicidally Democrat, but to make Dems more liberal and the G.O.P. more moderate—to take up an argument from the previous post about this book. I don’t really understand why the task of making the G.O.P. more moderate isn’t even considered. Bigmacattack is right—I don’t think G.O.P. voters particularly want to destroy the Social security system. And I think you probably could get more movement on national health care from within the G.O.P. than B. thinks—you could at the very least modify Big Pharma’s attempt to stifle competition in the drug market. In fact, that is just the sort of pro-capitalist position I think G.O.P. voters would go for.
I find the blind dismissal of the G.O.P. rather incomprehensible.

I wouldn’t be quite that cynical myself. Power
corrupts: without power, you might as well be
honest. So there’s nothing in the current
Democratic leadership to compare with the scale of
the Abramoff scandals. They might become
corrupt bastards if they win power, but for the
moment I’ll take my chances with the possibly-corrupt-in-future
against the already-proven-corrupt.

The ‘uphill battle’ metaphor in the NYT article is a quote from the RNC chair, what else would you expect him to say?