Over at Eschaton, Duncan posted the following this afternoon:

Is Ben Nelson Insane?

Perhaps someone should ask Axelrod, since he's trying to sink the HCR bill.

You can make the punch a hippie strategy work for you, or you can just do it for sport.

Having been invited on to a blogger conference call with David Axelrod, I decided to pass on Duncan's question. Here's Axelrod's response (apologies for just posting the audio but not transcribing it -- I cut a significant chunk out of my middle finger yesterday and typing is a little laborious):

Here's Ari Melber's characterization of the exchange under the headline "Axelrod Walks Back Insanity Defense on WH Blogger Call":

MyDD's Jonathan Singer said he was channeling another blogger, Duncan Black, to ask whether Axelrod's recent "insane" remark about Howard Dean's position also applied to Ben Nelson's willingness to scuttle the entire bill. "I'm not professionally qualified to judge insanity and maybe I should have used a different word," Axelrod said, and he noted that "everybody's a little on edge at this point" in the long legislative battle. He also stressed his respect for allies in the "progressive community," but reiterated his view that it would be "wrongheaded" to squash all of health care reform at this point, which is "infinitely better" than the status quo.

You can read more about the call from Melber.

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Glenn Greenwald has recently posted a very abstract jeremiad about our corrupt "establishment," with multiple concurring citations from Atrios,Paul Krugman,Matt Taibbi,Armando, (Big Tent Democrat on TalkLeft), and even Eliot Spitzer, recently returned from the dead by a collective realization that he was right about everything.

Our "establishment" is corrupt, and public outrage about the AIG bonuses is a very good thing, because it scares the corrupt "elite," and fear is the only force that can control those monsters.

This is only half right, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough, and stops at a politically safe distance from the Oval Office, which is exactly where the buck is supposed to stop, and where Barack Obama continues to enable and support the most corrupt financial "establishment" since almost exactly the same corrupt "establishment" produced the Great Depression.

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I'm with Atrios. I like Hillary Clinton, I just don't like the people who advise her campaign and I tend to disagree with some of her political judgments.  Mark Schmitt has a great rundown of what a problem Mark Penn really is, including the corporate conflicts of interest implied by his role in her campaign.  The Democrats fell apart in the 1980s for a variety of reasons, but one of the manifestations of the collapse was the increase of influence of relatively non-progressive centrists like Penn, who were often on retainer to tobacco, telecom and pharma because it was good business to have influential consultants on their payroll.

I've done a fair amount of blogging about the Democratic machine and what a problem these people really are.  While Hillary Clinton is in bed with these people, she has also had a long career in Democratic politics.  She faced the smear machine in the 1990s way before any of us were organizing on her behalf.  For better or for worse, Mark Penn had her back at that time, and that matters to Senator Clinton.

I don't agree with her policy choices and judgment, and I often question her character in this context.  But she's also a gutsy and extremely intelligent politician, and we ought not to forget that.  You cannot discount what it means to have a woman running for President, and how she brings intelligence, resolve and poise to that role.  It's our role in politics to bring her to a different place, to show her that progressive politics can be done with progressive structures, and that the perceived double-talk on single issue micropolling is no longer necessary or productive.  Ultimately, and this may not be possible though I think it will be, we will have to figure out how to work together as strong allies.  Both Clinton and the blogs went through the crucible of the right-wing smear machine, and it's hard to discount that.

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Cross Posted in Orange and Green. 

On the Eve of Blogosphere Day, I spent my evening (and a considerable part of the work day) with Chris Bowers of MyDD, BooMan, and the other denizens of Drinking Liberally and stars of the Philly Blogosphere (among them Atrios).  Chris and I went to the screening of Inconvenient Truth, which featured a question and answer session with the former Vice President and current legitimate President himself.  

Chris and I arrived promptly at 4:00 p.m.  I arrived before Chris and had to spurn the advances of Green Party petitioners who seized the opportunity of Al Gore's appearance for a petition drive to get them on the ballot.

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In the past couple of weeks, I've posted a couple of informationaldiaries regarding an upcoming fundraiser that the Penn College Democrats were planning to host. Titled 'An Evening in Blue', we set out to bring together candidates for various offices - mayor (Michael Nutter); state legislature (Paul Lang); and congressional candidates (Dennis Spivack, Lois Murphy, and Patrick Murphy) - to interact with Democrats on-campus. Furthermore, knowing that the netroots will be an important factor in upcoming elections, we also invited Chris Bowers (from MyDD) and Duncan Black (Atrios, from Eschaton) to address the group; furthermore, Booman also showed up, bringing together some of the most prominent liberal bloggers on the Internet.

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