I remain slightly amused and concerned about the situation around Senator Lieberman. Having no party affiliation, I don't care on any official or emotional level how the Democrats choose to organize their party. I do care about the openness of intellectual discussion and debate in our discourse that is being snuffed out by party ideologues. The Republicans have done this and have rightly been marginalized (their candidates certainly didn't get my vote this year).

Those on the left who seek to purify the Democratic Party will ultimately be emulating the Republican path to shrillness and irrelevance (hence my amusement at the way the party, after gaining control of the government, would use it to emulate the worst aspects of contemporary Republicanism). They will also be alienating voters like myself who supported President-Elect Obama because he refused to fit neatly into the partisan boxes that the rabid ideological bases of the parties demand. It is this style of politics that has broken our government at the national level, with Republicans, admittedly, leading the way over the past eight years.

This is not to say that Obama won't be a president of the center left. But if he does create an administration and a political environment that permits dissent among people across the political spectrum to be heard (as opposed to marginalized or punished), then he will go much further to correcting the systemic failures of our government than he would by tossing out those within and outside his party who don't pass a very narrow litmus test. This is George Bush governance, and I, for one, am heartened to see that Obama has taken some preliminary but real steps to show that he understands an important factor in what has gone wrong in our federal government over at least the past decade. Whether or not Lieberman supported his longtime friend in a presidential bid is irrelevant to the task of fixing this country; his constituents can decide on whether or not he is representing them appropriately in four years. But the more the Democrats, or at least the far left, fixate on him, the more convinced I’ll become that they don’t understand the full breadth of the coalition Obama assembled to win the election. The Democrats will disassemble this coalition at their own risk.

Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure that one can generalize about periods in a democracy where electoral alignments are static. Simply, they are static until an event disrupts them. There has been some argument that 2008 could be a year in which we see a realignment, but we won't really know until after the election (I think 1932 and 1980 are considered by political scientists as years where realignment occurred). I certainly agree with you about the ideal characteristics of voting citizens, though I'm not sure that such people always lack influence. Bush currently has a 28% approval rating. Who's to say that the quarter of the population that has turned on him (who are probably more centrist) won't sway the next election as opposed to the quarter that still support him (which undoubtedly represents a large portion of the Republican base)?

I didn't mean to imply that the media echo-chambers of the left and right were on equal footing (I'm not really sure how to compare them, and I don't know how one would begin to measure such a thing). But I do think it is fair to say that the left as more places to publicly express it's opinions than it did twenty years ago (though the right too has access to these new platforms of course). The left probably doesn't have figures that achieve the media saturation of Coulter and Limbaugh. But we'll see in a few months if the Limbaughs and Coulters really have the influence claimed for them. Maybe I don’t watch enough cable news, but Coulter seems like more of a joke today than she did four years ago. The McCain nomination should be evidence enough that there is currently some disconnect between conservative media figures and conservatives more broadly.