Which branch of the Democrat party is more to blame for its failures?

[The Duke]

I have to disagree with thefactor's essay.

Al Gore was most certainly a hard left candidate on a number of issues, mainly economics.  If you were to distill the Gore campaign down ot a single sentence, what would that sentence be?  The sentyence would be the refrain Gore uttered over and over again: The people versus the powerful.  This is a base populist message, telling voters to reassert their economic interest against various corporations and the wealthy.  The entire campaign was based on liberal class warfare.  While there was a token tax cut thrown in (Gore's commitment to the tax cut was highly dubious), the heart and soul of the platform, the portions Gore emphasized were expansions in Federal health and pension programs.  I do not consider this a failure of centrism, and the case fro the Gore 2000 campaign being a failure of centrism is far weaker in my view than the case for the Clinton 1996 victory being a win for centrism.

In fact, I think 2000 is a case of centrism defeating liberal populism if anything.  George Bush has not run a centrist administration, but its easy to forget that his 2000 campaign was a centrist campaign.  He ended Republican orthodoxy that favored abolishing the Department of Education, endorsed a Rx Drug Benefit for Medicare, and his proposed tax cut was 1/3rd the size of the tax cut proposed by Bob Dole four years earlier.  If there was a centrist candidate in 2000, it was most certainly not Al Gore.

As for retaking or not retaking the House.  It is true, and you establish this beyond doubt, that the DLC did not succeed in retaking the House in 1996, 1998, 2000, or 2002.  You have established that centrist Democrats could not beat conservative Republicans.  But what you don't establish is that liberal Democrats could beat conservative Republicans.  I think the evidence supporting the liberals is paper thin.  Nancy Pelosi cannot be considered a centrist, yet in 2004 she failed as badly as Gephardt to retake the House.  Was there some ideological gray area between her and Haster/DeLay?

One last thing, you strike me as someone who does not have a first hand memory of 1980s politics.  The identity politics/nuclear freeze/soft on crime Democratic Party of Mike Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, Mario Cuomo, and Ann Richards.  Can anyone imagine the Democratic Party nominating a candidate for President who endorsed weekend furloughs for murderers like Dukakis did?  Of course not, they'd be smashed!  Yet this is the liberal position on crime that Clinton abandoned.  You won't convince me that what happenned in the 1980s with Democrats is the way to win national elections.