Can the Democrats Lose? Only If They Really Try

In a recent article in The Nation, Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future and president of Progressive Majority, writes of the importance of the upcoming presidential election, "The increasing vitriol of the Democratic presidential WrestleMania shouldn't distract from the opportunity before progressives. The election this year has the potential to be not simply a change election but a sea-change election, one that marks the end of the conservative era that has dominated our politics for nearly three decades. It could be the progressive equivalent of the conservative triumph of 1980."

It should be and, by all rational thought, it will be a repudiation of the radical conservative mindset as finally adopted and, perhaps, corrupted by George Bush. We have seen repeatedly over the past seven years instances of using unfounded threats of terrorism and other adoption of fear tactics to distract the American public from scandal and incompetence in the halls of government. (I have written a companion piece citing chapter and verse of some of these occurrences.)

Unfortunately both the campaign of Senator Clinton and others on the progressive/liberal political spectrum have gleefully adopted the smear-fear approach to the possibility that Senator Obama might well be the forty-fourth president of the United States.