THOSE MARVELOUS MORPHING DEMOCRATS

From the American Prospect:

It isn't 1964, of course, and the Democrats have painfully learned one of the chief political lessons of the '60s: The politically sustainable programs tend to be those that are universal, rather than race-specific or means-targeted, and those that reward individual initiative. Moreover, their neo-war on poverty comes inextricably intertwined with their war on middle-class stagnation. The candidates all call for a higher minimum wage, for comprehensive health insurance, for increasing funding as well as standards for troubled schools, for energy-efficient and job-generating public works, for community service in return for subsidized college tuition, for the re-legalization of a worker's right to join a union, for fairer international trade. More in the spirit of the New Deal than the Great Society, they advocate policies that would help not just the poorest 15 percent of Americans but the bottom 70 percent.

But in speaking as they do of specifically helping the poor, they have nonetheless broken a two-decade taboo of Democratic politics.

And yet the sky has not fallen, or even sagged.

This is a pretty interesting analysis of what now seems to be driving the once and future Democrats--clearly, the left wing of the donkey party has, as they say, revitalized itself and now appears to be calling some of the shots.

Maybe that'll make my voting for Kerry next November a little less malodorous. I hope.

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