zenpundit.com

There appears to be an emerging civil war in the Democratic Party flowing along generational, ideological, gender and racial lines that has just spilled onto one of the premier sites of the Left blogosphere, the DailyKOS:

On Friday, it got to be too much for Alegre, a diarist on the flagship liberal blog DailyKos, who frequently writes in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our online community has tried to accomplish in this world,” Alegre wrote Friday evening. “No more.”

Objecting to the tone of attacks against Mrs. Clinton and her supporters on the blog, the diarist called for a “writers strike.”

“This is a strike – a walkout over unfair writing conditions at DailyKos. It does not mean that if conditions get better I won’t ‘work” at DailyKos again,” Alegre wrote, promising to come back only “if we ever get to the point where we’re engaging each other in discussion rather than facing off in shouting matches.”

The blogosphere has never been known for its polite, gentle discourse, and while fiercely partisan, being a Democrat does not make one immune from attacks from the lefty blogs (see Lieberman, Joseph I.). But now, the major internal divisions within the Democratic Party seem to be splitting liberal bloggers. So what happens when the unity enforcement mechanism becomes disjointed?

….One user, Sentient, called for a “permanent succession”:

“Why should this site and Kos profit from the traffic we add to DailyKos, and the sense by outsiders that it represents the netroots as a whole?” the blogger asked, adding later, “But I just don’t see how people come back together on a daily basis after a falling out like this.”

If you heavily promote a kind of political discourse based upon demonizing opponents and venting bile it soon becomes a habitual frame of mind. All disagreement becomes intolerable and ad hominem invective rules. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of zealots.

Via John, I noted that James Fallows has some posts citing Chuck Spinney of DNI and generally injecting 4GW and John Boyd’s OODA Loop into his political analysis of the Democratic primary battle.

Sweet! Kinda wish I’d thought of that myself.

In politics, ambiguity, restraint and a lack of passionately held policy positions can be an advantage as the public wishfully projects their hopes and assumptions on to the candidate. Or it can simply mask the fact that the candidate has no well-thought out philosophy or basic command of the subject in question. This is great if it means the candidate is open to accepting well-considered “new thinking” but bad if the candidate simply picks up positions ad-hoc without really contemplating the downstream implications.

Senator Barack Obama’s recent sojurns in to trade policy on the campaign trail, which seem to be raw political appeals to rentier interests of the moment, are alarming economists generally associated with the Democratic Party ( Senator John McCain, the inevitable GOP nominee, isn’t any better informed on basic economics theory than is Obama – making 2008 a worrisome choice if the economy goes into the tank).

Let’s assume that Senator Barack Obama wins a narrow but clear majority of Democratic primary votes and delegates but Senator Hillary Clinton nevertheless captures the nomination by prying away just enough insider superdelegates through a series of shady, oleaginous, backroom deals.

Do African-Americans and twentysomething white liberals rebel? Do Democrats close ranks through gritted teeth ? Does Obama accept the Veep slot? Do Democratic-leaning independents go for McCain? What ?

Generally, I shy away from two things here: the excessive blogospheric focus on partisan politics and the lazy open thread post. I am making a one-time exception today ( and NO it is not out of sloth -LOL!).

Having no dog in this hunt and a readership that is wider, politically speaking, than most blogs, I’m genuinely curious to know what my readers think of the candidates for president, who they favor (or abominate) and why. Or anything that reasonably relates to this general topic.

Fire at will.