Purple pols painted Blue

Glenn Greenwald, in a post noting how the conventional wisdom promulgated by the Right suggested that Jim Webb's victory was an anathema to the netroots when in fact he actually was endorsed by Kos, makes an important tangential point:

this same fiction is repeated over and over in all corners and, despite its glaring falsity, has the status of conventional wisdom among the national media. Anti-Bush bloggers are leftist ideologues. Their goal is to force the Democratic Party to adopt ideologically leftist positions and therefore will ensure its defeat. Mainstream political figures like Howard Dean and John Kerry -- whose views on most issues are supported by the majority of Americans -- are fringe, extremist leftists whom the anti-Bush bloggers love because of their leftist extremism. And all of them are radioactive losers whose influence and even mere existence are fatal to Democrats.

This is the same intellectual sloth and dishonesty which enables the Instapundit's of the world, to this day, to continue to depict Howard Dean as being some sort of leftist extremist when Dean is one of the least ideological political figures on the national scene and, to the extent he can be ideologically characterized at all, is to the right of most national Democrats on most issues and has been for his entire career. What specific views does Dean hold, or Kos for that matter, which can be characterized by any honest person as "extremist"? While this conventional wisdom is spewed, that question is never answered. But Republicans have pounded that smear drum for so long, and the media has passively ingested and then disseminated it so thoroughly, that the Instapundit's of the world have had that "point" engrained in their head and can never do anything but repeat it endlessly despite its complete separation from what is real.


(emphasis mine - I've been arguing since 2002 that Howard Dean is a centrist/conservative Democrat on most issues).

Glenn (G) is pretty hard on Glenn (R) but it should be noted that Glenn (R) updated his post in question. Still, the larger point stands - the Reds know that if Purple politicians are recognized for their true color, those pols will win against Red, so they try to paint them Blue. And the Democrats consistently field Purple candidates (like Howard Dean and Brian Schweitzer) more often than the Republicans do.

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