Splendid. If he couldn't make the DLC deal, why would anybody expect him to show up for the nutroots? Kos & Co. should go pound sand. Maybe they can get Ralph Nader.

knows has a k in it.

Rethink that last sentence, Robert. The platform might just give the narcissistic Ralph Nader more impetus to run. I bet he would love to play the spoiler in november.

why don't the members of the netroots grow up already? If they really want their candidate to win, surely they have to realize you don't win a general election by pandering to fringe interest groups.

scire, it's not even pandering to fringe interest groups. If you break every issue down in isolation from all other issues, all positions are at best plurality, not majority, positions, and therefore "fringe". That includes every policy position you personally hold, as well as every one I personally hold. The point is that no two humans agree with each other on all conceivable points. If you demand that politicians agree with you on all of your personal preferences, you will never be able to vote for anybody ever. Voting for president isn't about perfect, it's about better. The childishness of the "netroots" movement on issues like this is not that they hold "fringe" opinions, it's that they pretend that only perfect adherence to their total agenda is acceptable.

rhubarbs: well said. Exactly what I was thinking, but couldn't spit out.

scrubbyoak--

I'm always prepared to do a re-think, but to the best of my knowledge Nader has already thrown his propeller beanie into the ring. He and the nutroots deserve each other. Same smarmy elitism, same pretensions of moral superiority, same image of political toads for most of the rest of the population.

Rhubarbs reminds me of a graph I've always wanted to plot with the majority electorate's preferred  positions on issues depicted as dots on a field divided by a vertical line, "Republican" on one side, and "Democrat" on the other with distance from the centerline describing intensity/degree of radicalism: abortion rights, school vouchers, guns, military spending, energy policy, gay marriage, UHC, social security--the lot. Most dots would cluster around the mid-line with some self-identified Republicans on the Dem side for some issues, and vice versa.

This is the first election in a long time, if not ever, in which self-identified Independents outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. I think Obama's perfectly positioned to personify the zeitgeist here, and he seems to know it. Smacking the nutroots and Jessie Jackson looks like a good move to me.

Those of us covering the campaign got an e-mail from Obama communications strategist Robert Gibbs a little