At a Vermont Democratic Party event honoring Howard Dean, Dean made a passionate plea to Vermont legislators to pass a marriage equality bill. I'll take it as a sign of progress that Dean's remarks were not the most noteworthy thing about the article covering the event.

A little further down the page, I found this:

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the evening's second keynote speaker...called for greater political courage in the coming years.

"We need both the courage of our convictions and the courage to compromise," she said. "Sometimes compromise is the only way forward, especially in the United States Senate."

She ridiculed Republican efforts to slow the administration's economic policies.

"They drove the car in the ditch and now they want us to take driving lessons from them," she said. "The nerve."

Senator McCaskill, who is part of Evan Bayh's moderate coalition in the Senate, has been one of many redstate Democrats whose standard mantra has been to get away from "partisan bickering" and reach across the aisle, yet here she is targeting Republicans as the ones who are to blame for obstructing the president's agenda. I guess it should come as no surprise that Democrats who had formerly enabled Republicans by insisting on cooperation with them would now turn to throwing red meat to scapegoat them; it takes the heat off the real obstructors of the progressive agenda: moderate Democrats themselves. Once upon a time it was we angry bloggers who were the partisan flamethrowers; now we're the ones challenging Democrats to be better and it's the post-partisan crowd throwing the flames at Republicans. Go figure.

Now let me be clear, Senator McCaskill is not an active obstructor of anything that I'm aware of. As far as I'm concerned, she's a good faith partner with President Obama in the Senate. But her alliance with Bayh and the other pro-business Democrats who call themselves moderate to hide the fact that their most important constituents are the businesses in their states, gives them political cover. It is Bayh and co. who are actively threatening two pillars of Obama's agenda (and that's just for starters): cap and trade climate change legislation and a cram-down housing bill that would allow judges to write down mortgages to help people stay in their homes. While Senator Bayh has spoken the empty rhetoric of compromise, what he is doing here is no less than threatening to hold Obama's agenda hostage in the name of business interests. Senator McCaskill, I wish you'd turn your sights to the real obstructors and turn your pleas of real compromise to your fellow "moderate" Senators.

For a revealing and maddening look at why and how a few business-friendly Democrats may just succeed at watering down (at best) and scuttling (at worst) elements of the president's agenda, check out Jonathan Chait's must-read article in TNR. Here, for me is the nut of the piece:

Some moderate Democrats seem to suffer from a conflation of their own fund-raising strategies with responsible fiscal policy. The Wall Street Journal reported, of a group of Democratic Senate centrists, "Their stated goal is to rein in deficits and to protect business interests." In fact, this is not a goal but two often-conflicting goals, and neither is synonymous with "the national interest." This sort of behavior didn't hurt Bush because his agenda largely was synonymous with business interests. But the Democratic agenda isn't, and Democratic confusion of the two is poisonous.