LEFT AND CENTER. Adding to what Matt and Blake have already written, I've long been curious as to precisely how a centrist Vermont governor became the voice of the Left in the United States. Although Dean's non-Iraq policy preferences don't place him as far right in the Democratic spectrum as Jack Murtha, they did leave him comfortably to the right of the establishment candidate of the Democratic Party in 2004. The war's dominance over the distinction between left and center found its way into the blogosphere, where self-identification as a "centrist" almost invariably seemed shorthand for support of the war. A similar dynamic is happening now. Because Murtha is outspoken in opposition to the war, he's become popular with the left wing of the party in spite of a predominantly conservative record. That's fine, as the Iraq War is the most important single policy question facing us today. However, it's also one of the issues on which the new Congress will have the least control over policy in the next two years. For a Congress that will be dealing with a lot of issues other than the war, it seems to make more sense to stick with the candidate who's a)slightly farther left, and b) more of an established leadership quantity. This in addition, of course, to the yummy bacon problem that Blake mentions.
--Robert Farley
