Gore helps out, Wadhams gets pissy

This past Thursday Al Gore sent out an email to MoveOn.org members calling on their help funding the Senate races of a few important environmentally conscious candidates. He wrote,

Trust me, Barack can only succeed if we also elect more champions in the Senate to stand up to the incredibly powerful oil lobby. Those leaders are emerging—and three of them are in close Senate races. Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Mark Udall in Colorado, and Al Franken in Minnesota are all real, clean-energy heroes who need our help to win. And they're fighting against Republicans who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the oil industry.

Of course, Republicans like nothing less than a nationally recognizable and popular environmental icon meddling in Senate races they are involved in. They prefer meddling be done on their own terms.

And so, Schaffer campaign manager Dick Wadhams hammed it up, saying that, "It shows [Udall] is still held in high regard and absolutely trusted by the far, far left of the Democratic Party as epitomized by MoveOn.org and Al Gore."

Wadhams really needs to come to grips with the fact that this sort of Karl Rove-ian attempt to pigion-hole Udall as a "boulder liberal" isn't a particularly effective strategy in Colorado. In every press release Dick the Ham refers to Congressman Udall as "boulder liberal mark", since the first debate (though toned down in later debates) Schaffer consistently depricated Mark's constituency as all just boulder liberals. And yet, despite that and millions of dollars of targeted attack ads, for some reasons Schaffer's numbers just aren't getting any better. Stop condescending to us Coloradans Dick, we're smarter than that.

Meanwhile, Democrats need to stop shying from the word "left." Because lets face it, there is no natural political center, its just a contingency reflecting arbitrary media framing, a vague approximation of public opinion, and the strident voices of neocons repeating the word "liberal" like a montra.

What it comes down to is this. When 80% of Americans believe that global warming is happening, and 68% believe that the US government should take more action to curb it even if other world governments do not; when 94% of American believe that U.S. Oil Companies are a direct cause of the recent increase in energy prices, I think it is fair to say this: Al Gore, and MoveOn's environmentalism is centrism.

Memo to the GOP: in the parlance of your times, perhaps our advocacy was Left; but in the parlance of our times, we are the norm--you are the radicals.