Tactical Lessons

John Judis has an informative post up on The New Republic website today that describes some of the work done by liberal activists in support of insurance reform. Appropriately he talks about Obama's somewhat belated but no less critical efforts to take the case for reform directly to the people with a series of speeches, but he also talks about how liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and Health Care for America NOW! pressured wavering Democratic representatives with television ads and threats of funding primary challengers.

Jonathan Chait has written a somewhat less cogent post, also on TNR, mulling over whether Clintonism is or isn't dead. He describes Clintonism in political science terms as being an application of "median voter theory" which holds that the most powerful voter, i.e. the voter with the power to flip an election one way or another, is the voter whose views place him smack dab at the center of the political spectrum. Clinton and his compadres held that the best, possibly the only way for Democrats to win elections in a post-Reagan universe was to abandon any and all policy initiatives that didn't appeal directly to that median voter. I don't know whether or not Clintonism is dead, but I sure as hell hope so. I'm all in favor of compromises where compromise is due, but if you compromise everything to the will of some fictional average voter as defined by opion polls, what are you and what do you have to offer?

Let's have more of the kind of activism described in Judis' post--both from the President and from the party rank and file. The middle is nowhere. Better to lose an election than to make yourself into a fickle, ill-defined nulity. The "median voter" is the median voter because he doesn't know what in hell he wants. A true leader knows what's right and shows all who will follow how to get there.