Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The Opinionator: A blog at the NY Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellentrop

While Hendrick Hertzberg finds the appeal of nostalgia at YearlyKos, other liberals simply find the deja vu repellent. “YearlyKos will add nothing to a much needed debate on the future direction of our country,” insists Nancy (The Hankster) Hanks. “The time for insurgence in the DP is over. Without a relationship to independent voters — left, center and right — YearlyKos will remain safely within the boundaries of the very partisan political culture that is responsible for the bad policy we are living with right now.”

The freelance journalist Marc Cooper shows a little outrage. “Showing up to pander to the online activists (whatever that means) does not in itself make a revolution, nor necessarily even denote much of a shift of political gravity within the Democratic Party,” he writes on his blog. “That sort of paradigm shift requires more than a stiffening of the will of the Democrats. It also means that liberal blogs (especially after the Dems win the coming election) are going to have to show some real independence and not settle for being mere transmission belts of the party ‘communications’ apparatus.”