re: #679 Obdicut

He’s really not, though.

Sean Penn celebrates him.

Nobody else really does.

Nobody in the Democratic establishment does.

Magical Balance Fairy does not exist.

I would say that part of the conversation we’re having is that there is more of a divide on the left between the farther-left activists and celebrities, and the mainstream Democratic politicians, whereas the mainstream Republicans are somewhat more beholden to their farther-right (although very far from farthest right) wing. It’s not universal, but it’s a general trend.

This is actually an important distinction to make. I often find groups like Code Pink thrown up to me as examples of ‘the Left’ behaving badly, but they have very little mainstream access, which is why it worries me when groups that seems similarly kooky on the right appear to be getting it.

Similarly, I find that people here sometimes expect Obama to do extreme things to pander to his ‘base’. The radical left is not a base for the Democrats in the same way the radical right is for the Republicans. They are a far more inconsistent source of votes, and far less likely to rally their followers to turn out the vote for a mainstream politician. Obama probably benefited from the bounce he got from a portion of this group losing their heads over him, but his strategy can’t involve extensive courting of them for 2012, because in order to do that he would alienate too many mainstream Democratic voters and lose a majority of the independents. He’s going to need to win reelection without the left fringe, or not at all.

Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be in a situation where the ‘base’ is moving farther and farther right, and getting more unruly by the day.

My analysis. It’s difficult, because we tend to try to imagine U.S. politics as having some kind of bilateral symmetry, but except for the fact that about half of the voters will vote THIS way, and about half will vote THAT way, it doesn’t.