Democrat Tent is Smaller No Room for Moderates

An interesting post by Gene Koprowski on the Netroots effect on elections and particularly on candidates running as democrats who are moderate. The Kos Kids got to work on a democrat who dared be moderate and who supported Bush. He won his general election in 2004 by a 59% so he was pretty solid with his constituents and was a popular choice. Then the hard left netroots got started:

He started to alienate national liberals, however, who started to fund and back a primary challenge against him, online.
Though he was a Democrat, he was a moderate one, and he received support from Republicans, hoping to rebuff the more liberal Democrats who wanted Cuellar out. When President Bush entered the House chamber for the State of the Union address earlier this year, he was pictured hugging Cuellar. That started a massive online movement to defeat Cuellar. Bloggers Markos "Kos" Moulitsas and Duncan "Atrios" Black led the campaign. Other bloggers joined in, and US$500,000 was raised to defeat Cueller.

In the March 7th primary, Cuellar won re-election, but with just 53 percent of the vote, not much of a margin for an incumbent politician. His opponent, Ciro Rodriguez, netted 41 percent of a vote, and another challenger grabbed six percent. Rodriguez was the pol whom Ceullar defeated, for the first time, in 2004 by just a handful of votes.

Kos and the hard left did not get Cueller's scalp but the near call was a moral victory for the hard left:

Kos, of "Daily Kos" fame, is gleeful about his newfound influence. "So we didn't kill off Cuellar," he wrote in a blog entry. "But we gave him a whooping where none was expected and made him sweat. That's the reason why Lieberman is sweating in Connecticut."

Liberal online bloggers are waging another "netroots" challenge against another centrist Democrat, Joe Lieberman, the former nominee for vice president of the U.S.

Expect more of this in the future -- hard core activists, from around the country, linked in virtual communities, like blogs or wikis, via the Web, banding together to try to take down leaders of temporal communities, far from where they reside. It's the ultimate in digital democratization.

Koprowski is dead on, and there is no room for a moderate let alone a conservative democrat in the democratic party any longer. It's a party bought by MoveOn and the tent only has seats for those who sit on the extreme left side of the smaller tent....................

On a related local STL level, this editoral by the Post Dispatch shows just how of touch that gang are:

Voters in the 2nd district, in Lincoln and western St. Charles counties, tend to be conservative and Republican. But the Republican cuts to social programs, particular Medicaid, are causing a backlash. Gov. Blunt is not campaigning for Mr. Rupp. "I just wanted to run on my own," Mr. Rupp explained.

In the special election, Democrat Wayne J. Henke's views, which more closely reflect the compassionate conservatism of the district, make him the clear choice.

As I stated, the editorial team at the Post Dispatch are asleep at the wheel as usual and blather on about things that they have no understanding about, No suprise there...................The democrat party has moved hard left and there is no room for a moderate let alone a compassionate conservative. Do those guys at the Post Dispatch really get paid for those editorials?