The number one job that the Democrats are doing at the moment is simply not being Republicans. That may be an uninspiring message, but it's their single biggest accomplishment and nothing even comes close to it in importance. The policy accomplishments are more important for what they can do to maintain the allegiance of the public than they are in themselves. I'm not saying that policy doesn't matter or that the Democrats weren't elected to get things done. I'm saying that the Republican Party cannot be allowed to govern this country at the executive or congressional level because they will ruin us and get an unspeakable number of people killed. You can disagree with me, but that's what they did under Bush and they're twice as crazy now as they were just two years ago.
I agree with BooMan in the main here. However, saying that stopping Republicans so long as Republicans remain in white-racist christian-talibanist greedhead-bully mode is Job One is not saying that it is the only job or that education agitation and organization to achieve progressive reforms and outcomes is not important, so don't put words to that effect in my mouth, please, and go into the usual convulsions of performance art radicalism in the Moot.
To be so demoralized by the pace of progressive reform that you sit out the elections or skip off into third-party foolishness (given actually existing institutional constrains on third parties, obviously longer term third-party strategies are well worth contemplating so long as they do not undermine practical progressive politics here and now) all in ways that would facilitate actively authoritarian and reactionary Movement Republicanism is simply either delusive or stupid. We must build on what we have to make things better rather than demolishing what we have because it fails for now to be all that we would demand of it.
Frankly, given the scale of Democratic accomplishments over the last couple of years -- which, contra BooMan, seem to me to matter for the lives they have improved rather than only for the partisan allegiance they inspire -- accomplishments achieved through heartbreaking compromise and relentless effort in the face of literally unprecedented monolithic Republican obstructionism, I find it a bit weird that Democrats aren't running on their record as well as running on exposing the dangerous insanity and authoritarianism of the Republican alternative in this especially debased moment in that Party's history. Obviously the ongoing catastrophe of the economy makes this difficult, but the lack of an effective media strategy for the promotion of real Democratic accomplishments and the failure of the Netroots to pick up the slack by finding ways of celebrating reforms while at once pushing from the left for more substantial reforms goes a long way to explain the current dilemma Democrats may face.
That said, I've said it before I'll say it again, I really do think the Democratic doomsaying narrative is overblown and does not comport well with actual polling in my view, so I wouldn't go into survivalist mode for fear of a Republican putsch in November by any means.
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