Is DailyKos Really Rush for Liberals?

We right-wingnuts and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement.  Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited.  We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.

Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins. 

OK.  There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass.  Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.

[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they’re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.

Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites.  So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence?  Hawkins writes:

Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.

Yet now they think it is OK?

A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.

So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks?  Do they know something we don’t know?  E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.  Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.

Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh’s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.

But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force?  And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community?  According to Dionne:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They’re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game. No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.

But there’s a basic difference here.  Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media.  People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren’t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.

On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square.  After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee.  How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?

Here’s my two cents worth.  I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats.  I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.

Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic.  The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them.  But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift. 

And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.