http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/10/ostrich-hunting-bill-clinton-gambit.html#comments

I'm not convinced that left vs. right is not the way to go.  The most conspicuous bias of the media these days is the assertive insistence on framing public debate in right vs. center terms.  NBC's Tim Russert is one of the most aggressive practitioners of this editorial policy, but it pervades all main$tream media.  Ever since the Reagan revolution, the conventional wisdom (established largely, I'm convinced, by sheer repetition) is that American public opinion is starkly conservative relative to (1) mid-20th century American public opinion and (2) "first world" public opinion.  We have been told for three decades now, very repeatedly, that Social Security is the only major political issue majority public opinion is on the (nominally) left side of.  It's equally common knowledge that civil liberties are box office poison, as their constituency includes only artists and intellectuals--no more than 1% of the electorate, to be sure.  And if I had a nickel for each time the M$M repeated the mantra about "the Democrats not being able to win with a non-southerner atop the ticket..."

The groundswell of populist progressive sentiment hasn't been lost on the M$M, but they still aggressively frame the debate, depicting the populist voter as one who cares about job security and health care, but is either apathetic or conservative about foreign policy or legal controversies.

If America can go through a generation-long period characterized by doctrinaire Republicans and finger-in-the-wind Democrats, it seems reasonable that a mirror image of this scenario should be possible.  If it were not possible, the rational thing for Democratic politicians to do would be to switch sides.  It's more important to me that the left's answer to the Reagan revolution happens during my lifetime than that some Democrat, any Democrat, wins the next election cycle.  Democrats simply have to stop being so afraid of losing.  Reagan didn't become the most (electorally) successful politician in my lifetime by playing to the center.  Thatcher famously said something unkind about the middle of the road, but since (being a vagrant netizen) I compose offline, I don't do quotations. :-) There are definite signs of a 'pendulum swing' underway.  Opportunity comes to those who strike the iron when it is hot.

I do, BTW, agree with outreach on the part of the Democrats to the principled conservatives.  In keeping with the mirror image analogy, there most be the analog of "Reagan Democrats," plausibly the most anti-anti-intellectual elements in the Republican base.  Keep an eyeball on the Huckabee-Paul spectrum.  The M$M will of course tell you until they're blue in the face that the Huckabee Republicans are most within the Democrats' reach.