Kurt Andersen, the man who founded the satiric Spy magazine in the late 1980s, has a piece in New York magazine that InstaPundit linked to today. It's filled with dark invective and sarcasm aimed at not just President Bush, but virtually all Americans who live in the blank white spaces of the famous New Yorker cartoon illustrating how liberal Manhattanites and their L.A. counterparts view "flyover country". In that sense, it's yet another example of the sort of coarse tone that short-circuits so many recent leftwing pieces by making them virtually indigestable by anyone who doesn't already agree with the author's biases. But in the middle of all of his bile, Anderson gets something spot-on:

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

Andersen's line about short-selling has consequences to the Democrats as they attempt to rebuild their power base after 10 years out of power in the House, along with and four--and guaranteed to be at least double that--in the oval office. A big reason why of course, is the difference between today's left and the pre-Class of '72-style liberals. What voters believed that FDR, JFK, LBJ or Harry Truman were political short-sellers? Who didn't believe that they weren't patriotic? That's a far cry from how today's red staters view Democrats.

A positive tone is a first step: any salesman will tell you that a spoonful of sugar makes the pitch go down that much easier with the intended listener. Loving your country (and not just the 23 square miles of Manhattan)--and internalizing that love, not just mouthing platitudes--is the next step on the long road back to respectability amongst voters in the flyover Red States, where Howard Dean has said he's going to try and do outreach. And I don't know how much he's up to either task.