The problem with Carl's formulation is twofold. First, it's based on a false assumption -- that it is possible to either push the national Democratic Party leadership to a more forward position on a host of issues, including the war, or to build momentum from an electoral base that will replace this leadership with a more progressively oriented leadership. Uh, no. Not what the party's for, as far as the leadership and the bulk of the electeds who benefit from their support of this leadership are concerned. Don't believe it? Ask someone like Cynthia McKinney.

Second, Carl assumes incorrectly that the most effective way to reach disaffected non-voters (who are growing in numbers every year, by the way) is to limit political positions to some sort of 'middle way' designed to best appeal to the 'middle' voters that Carl desperately believes we must reach to flip the electoral situation in this country.

This is naive. And wrong. A good contemporary example is the Huckabee campaign, where ol' boy and his handlers have rightly gauged the fragmentation and polarization amongst sectors of the prospective electorate and are going for targeted constituencies amongst the aforementioned with gusto. Where's the leftwing progressive frame amongst the best-oiled Democratic 'contenders' line to stand as a counterweight to Huckabee's right-wing populism? Why, nowhere if the party leadership has its way. Gravel isn't even invited to debates, and the 'serious' candidates are pained to tolerate even Kucinich within their electoral orbit.

The reality is that the Democratic Party's leadership will continue it's march unabated as a fully cooperative partner in the new neoliberal security state -- with all of the dire consequences that offers, from the demolition of our civil liberties to the perpetuation of foreign and domestic policies that spell nothing but misery for the vast majority of people on this planet.

People may lack access to good information, but they're not complete morons. They get this about the Democratic Party leadership, its supportive fellow officeholders, and its well-oiled financiers. They don't buy -- and in fact in recent years have been rejecting in record numbers -- the 'lesser of two evils' approach on which Carl's formulations are based. Why? Because they know that in the last twenty years, that approach has gotten them ... a pile of evils, but lesser, you know.

Furthermore, because many Americans are at least marginally shielded from the immediate affects of the war (like that it might kill them personally -- oh, the beauty of the 'all-volunteer army'), other issues ... like a burgeoning economic meltdown ... may very well roll over the war as lead issues. The antiwar movement needs to speak to the larger economic issues at stake here, honestly and outside of the dissembling doublespeak that characterizes the public pronouncemnts of much of the DP elected's in DC.

Carl can assert as often as he wants that it's the 'ultraleft' that has stalled out the anti-war movement and its impact on the electoral arena. But the mainstream antiwar movement has dutifully demobilized itself every electoral season for the last five years in the interest of electoral work to end the war, and the result has been the complete failure of the Democratic Party as a party to exercise even a fraction of the electoral tactics available to them to respect the majority of American voters and American residents period and take meaningful steps to end the war.

Nope, we should look instead to a larger failure in tactics and strategies -- including the failure to honestly air the root issues that drive not just the U.S. war policy, but the political dynamics and policies of economic inequity that inform the "American way".

Have a great time working for Murtha, Carl. That'll change the world for sure.