An extremist group like the Tea Party rose while Dems were caving to false centrism, bipartisanship.

[madfloridian]

That is my opinion. Just imagine such a group with bigotry toward women, gays, the poor and needy arising in America. It was a corporately funded movement, not grassroots. Yet there was no one speaking out about what was happening.

There was emphasis on not being partisan, not offending the other party....even though extremists had taken them over.

I believe it is partly because of the influence of "centrist" think tanks on our party. They got corporate money by pushing that which big money wanted, and then they did not need the "left" of the party anymore.

It was false centrism and the rush to "bipartisanship".

Here are quotes from three sources that are guaranteed not to get attention at the major Dem forums during an election year. I have not quoted Howard Dean in a while because I feel he could have been a powerful force for progressives. He may yet be again.

He said this in June 2010

"You did your job," Dean added. "You elected Barack Obama. You elected a Democratic Congress. You elected a Democratic Senate. And now it's time for them to behave like Democrats if they want to get reelected. They have forgotten where they came from -- and they haven't been here that long."

..."Dean said the progressive base is critical to Democrats' electoral successes this fall and beyond. "If Washington understands that they can't do things that demoralize their base," Dean said, "then we'll have a permanent (Democratic) majority."

R. J. Eskow had this to say after the 2010 election.

But the president and many other senior Democrats chose to take the advice of the "centrist" experts within their party by adopting unpopular Republican positions and getting nothing in return. After last night's rout, what are these experts advising? You guessed it: more of the same so-called "Centrism." That's an odd word to use for policies that most Americans oppose, like cutting Social Security or allowing bankers to enrich themselves by endangering the economy, but theirs is an Alice-in-Wonderland world.

Real centrists would defend Social Security and do more to rein in Wall Street, since those positions are popular across the political spectrum. It's a good thing the president said today that he wants to spend more time with the American people. Bankers and the Deficit Commission aren't "centrists" where most Americans live.

And a couple of paragraphs from a Robert Reich interview with Speigel Online:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When you served in the White House, President Bill Clinton began on the left but drifted to the middle after the Democrats lost significant ground in the mid-term elections. Do you see that happening again?

Reich: I was there with Bill Clinton when he tried to so called "triangulate" and please the voters in the middle. But the middle is a fiction. The middle is simply where most voters who respond to surveys say they are. What Clinton did and what Obama may be forced to do is to give up leadership; that is, to simply respond to polls. I think it would be a shame if Obama moved from leadership to opinion polls, but his advisors may feel that that's the only way to guarantee him a re-election.

Not popular things to say, but they are indeed true.