Are the Democrats Goldwater in '64, Eugene McCarthy in '68, or McGovern in '72?

Hugh Hewitt has a good article on Dean's embrace of the nutty Left's worldview. Realignment is in the works. Clinton masked it by being a neo-liberal, being a Southerner, and having an enormous charisma. Hence its hard to assess where in the process we are. Dean's own quirkiness cloud's assessment. The anti-Bush hatred suggests '72. Part of the question (the '64 part) revolves around where we will go in the struggle between neo-liberals (Clinton) and progressives (Dean). Note that old style Dems (Gephardt) are reduced to the role of spoilers.

William Saletan makes some useful observations from the NH debates in Slate. Scroll down to point 3. My take home from all of this is that Lieberman wants to carry the neo-liberal/new democrat mantle so clearly abandon by Gore in 2000.

I saw Gore speak at the University of Missouri in '92 and '96. He was a democrat I could live with, especially on economic and domestic issues. Likewise Clinton. I prefered Gore to Clinton on foriegn policy. When Gore ran in 2000, I was disheartened by his lurch to the left. He ceased to be the kind of democrat I could live with. Though I was not enamored by W (I voted for McCain in the primary), when confronted by an indifferent Republican and any Democrat I don't actively like, I vote Republican, because I'd rather have republicans appointed to Treasury, Commerce, State, Defence, and the rest, to democrats. In this case, I was abandonded by a dem I could have liked, and had no problem voting for W. I was right. Even before 9-11 proved thet W had come to office with a huge unexpected capacity, I liked his foriegn/defense team. Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, its all good. Its a line up like that which makes me a Republican. Presidents have limited power and spend a great deal of time being national exemplars, and so on. A good spate of appointments can make some real headway. For the record I was a Paul O'Neal fan as well. Its too bad he was shuffled out.

What the hell happened to Al Gore? In 1988 one of the memorable moments of the campaign (the seven dwarves, God I love Al Haig) was when Dick Gephardt charged Gore as follows: "So you decided that you'd better move to the right on defense and a lot of other issues. And lately you've been sounding more like Al Haig than Al Gore." Read about the whole incident here. That was an a democrat I could live with. Sure I supported Haig in '88 (and have the bumper stickers and campaign materials to prove it), and voted for Bush in '88 and '92, but Al Gore was the kind of Democrat you could work with. Not in 2000, he wasn't. He never had my vote in 2000, he lurched to the left. Now we see he's just kept going left, driven no doubt by resentment and animus over Florida (the dummy should have just won Tennessee) and vered from the land of the Vital Center to the land of MoveOn.org.

I'm a neo-liberal of the right. I like market solutions to social problems, and I am anti-statist (unless we're talking national security). I often find I have more in common with neo-liberals of the left than I do with other kinds of conservatives. I get along well with old anti-communists, and I like the WSJ crowd. If the Republican party is the party of business, I'm a happy camper. If it stands for capitalism, free markets, and a strong national defence, they reflexivly have my vote. Its the social conservatives I worry about. I tend to sympathize with social conservatives, but given a choice between, as Dennis Prager puts it, being pure or being free, I pick freedom every time.

So, as a neo-liberal of the right, I take a great deal of concern with what is going on with neo-liberals of the left. Who will win this power struggle in the democratic party? Will it be Lieberman and the Clintons, or the new Dean/Gore alliance?