Hillary Clinton was recently interviewed by Bill O'Reilly on Fox. Why now? Some say that she is abandoning the liberal left base (moveon, dailykos) to appeal to moderates and centrists. What do u think. By the way I read "the Argument" -- good read.

I wanted to write you and tell you how much I love The Argument. I'm a recent law school grad, and I've always been a big political junkie who loved to talk politics with his friends. However, your book crystallized my understanding of the Democratic Party, where it's been, where it is, where it's going and who might take it there. And it was damn funny, too. The stuff with Rob Reiner in particular is a personal favorite.

In a strange twist of fate, I've actually ended up becoming a Field Organizer for Hillary Clinton's campaign in North Carolina. Already I can see, as I reflect on the broader issues in the campaign and my view from my little part of it, just how accurate your insights were and how they apply to politics today.

I just wanted to drop you a line and say thanks for writing The Argument. I've just put the finishing touches on my senior honors thesis, studying the netroots (and to a broader extent, the Internet) in politics. The Argument proved an invaluable guide, and you proved very quotable. Have you considered a sequel if Obama wins in November? He appears to have learned from and built on Dean's lessons. Also, if you haven't, take a long look at both Obama and McCain's websites, especially their use of them as tools for GOTV and grassroots. Obama's winning that battle hands down; McCain looks like he's ceding the under-40 crowd already. Thanks again.

I've read some of your Times articles, the blog, and just read the Harper's interview - good work. And since you correctly point out in the interview that most people like their existing beliefs reinforced by their news sources, I would note that I am a libertarian-leaning conservative, so that's some evidence that you are achieving your stated goal of challenging preconceptions . So I ordered your book and plan to devote some of my time to your thoughts (one comment before reading it - were 300+ pages needed here?).

I would like to offer a different thought for how Democrats could create a coherent-intellectually-motivated movement (which is what I think you and others see as distinguishing the conservative movement from the disparate, pluralistic Democratic alliance). Perhaps Democrats should think on the roots of conservative ideology - not the maxims and conclusions, but just the first questions and the logical structure. What is the proper role of
government, ie why should free men constitute government? There is plenty of room to answer this question identically to a Milton Friedman (ie to accomplish those of our several goals which we can more effectively achieve through collective, coerced action) while still pushing for Democratic party values. You may find this simplistic or idiosyncratic, but ANY coherent political party will have to have common ground on why we have government if they are to hope for unity in the various proposals for what government should do. I don't think that most Democrats consider this question paramount and I think it is at the root of their seeming disorder and equally at the root of what unity there is in the conservative movement.

Just wanted to post this link to my interview with Harper's Online. Thanks.

First off, I wanted to say that I loved your book here. I'm reading it as background research for my master's thesis at the Kennedy [School]-- it's fantastic on every level One constructive criticism of your blog: Can you please put the dates of comments and your replies on the blog from now on. This is the first time I've been on here (I wanted to read more of your thoughts) and it's very hard to contextualize the entries without that. In fact, it would be really helpful if you started a blog entry as a byline--> date, location. Not trying to be needlessly nitpicky here, but I just think those new to your blog, or those looking over old posts, might find it very helpful.

Today's mail brought a copy of "the Candy Bombers," a new book by my friend and fellow writer Andrei Cherny. Some of you may have read his last book, "The Next Deal," an extraordinarily prescient argument for where the Democratic Party should go next. This time he's written a history of the Berlin Airlift. I had the pleasure of reading it in proofs, and it's really fabulous--gripping, moving and surprisingly relevant to the challenges we face today. Different people will be struck by different parts of the book, but what really jolted me was how lightly we look back today ion the threat of global Communism, when in fact it was, for a long moment, poised to change the course of human history, were it not for the courage and creativity of our own leaders. Anyway, I wanted to recommend the book to anyone who cares about such things. It should be in stores in early April. Thanks.

i finished The Argument a few months ago and i was blown away. having been a news/politics junkie since coming to NYU in 2000, i was amazed by the stories and personalities you brought to bear and as a musician and writer i was awed by the technique and artistry with which you did so. my friends, family and perfect strangers on the subway or at the bar were given diatribes on why the book was important, and i have finally benn able to include a passage on a recent blog post (http://liftwhileclimbing.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/new-politics/). thank you for your contribution to the dialogue, your voice strikes a much needed tone of sanity and honesty during such serious times.

I have three points here, the first dealing with a linchpin paragraph in *The Argument*, the second on the reluctance of the Right to seek consensus and the inherent desire of the Left to do just that; the third on the need
for a paperback edition of The Argument.

The linchpin paragraph begins on the bottom of p. 111, with “successful political movements aren’t built on the common values that all Americans share, but on the arguments that lay out how, as a country, we can best live up to them . . . It’s not enough to tell people that they ought to have health care and good schools and lots of jobs; they already know this. The point of a political movement is to explain why these things are lacking and to advance an argument about how we should adapt to the larger forces that led us here.” The notions in this paragraph (and this paragraph alone is worth the price of admission) are very close to the observations of political philosopher Ralph Lerner in his *The Thinking Revolutionary*. Lerner discusses the rhetorical task of John Adams, Adam Smith, David Hume, and others who wanted to persuade people to adopt “a more just alternative to the theological-political regime that had so long ruled Europe.” Consider, he says, the public speech by which these thinkers “sought to persuade their contemporaries to adopt maxims, conclusions, and rules of actions so much at odds with the certitudes of the day before yesterday. They had first to show their audience that the old preoccupations entailed unacceptable costs and consequences. Then–a much larger task–they had to propose a new model of political and social life, sketch its leading features in some detail, develop a case for preferring it, and defend it as
sufficient to cope with the shortcomings of the existing order.”

In other words, we argue that something has to be done. But we must always remember that something has to be done for the right reasons. For example, if your child asks “Why should I love Grandma?” you can reply, “Because Grandma has a lot of money and if you’re nice to her, she’ll leave it to you in her will.” Or you could reply, “Because she’s your Grandma.” Note that both responses ask for the same behavior–loving Grandma–but consider the different kinds of worlds that are constructed here. The first response constitutes a calculative relationship–do it for the money. The second responses constitutes a normative relationship–you do it because you do it. So with what you have in your *Argument* paragraph on 111-112, and what Lerner suggests, and what we can see with “why should I love Grandma,” we are talking about a language of justification: this is the way the world
is; here is a better way to approach things, and here is why. Moreover, arguments of the kind you (and, in the end, Mario Cuomo) suggest are critical to a great political party having something in common with the greatest of art and music. The arguments have to carry us beyond the immediate horizon, certainly, but they need to be rooted in our own experience. Here we might note Sullivan’s comments on Beethoven and the depth of his music: “It is only the very greatest kind of artist who presents us with experiences that we recognize both as fundamental and as
in advance of anything we may have hitherto known.”

My second point. The Right has never tried to reach consensus. As you suggest on p. 109 of The Argument, “These different groups of donors didn’t sit around a table and argue about what a conservative movement might look like. They simply set up their own foundations and began giving money to promising thinkers . . . .” You can’t cover everything in one book, of course, but it might be useful to push this notion a bit further. There does seem to be a reluctance on the Right to engage in collective behavior. Perhaps this reluctance is related to notions of free enterprise, or radical individualism, or libertarian notions. The Left/Progressive folks seem much more likely to sit around the table (as you describe so effectively in The Argument). Perhaps this desire for the
collective, for consensus, is related to larger notions of social engineering and collective action, the enthusiasm of the Left/Progressive folks for all-encompassing government programs. If so, then those within the Left/Progressive camp who want to get a move on and quit sitting around the table had best consider that the fundamental tenets of their own program themselves present a large obstacle to be overcome. My third point. I shall be using some of the key passages in The Argument in my grad seminar, “The Rhetoric of Leadership and Organizational Change.” I hope you can get Penguin Press to come up with a moderately priced paperback edition so I can with good conscience (books are prohibitively expensive for many students) put it on my required reading
list.

The fundamental argument in The Argument is that the Democratic Party, despite all of the meetings and the big money, continues to lack fundamental rhetorical grounding. A sound argument, and one with historical precedent. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville says that “What I call great political parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men.” Churchill, too, noted the need for principle rather than circumstance: “Those who are possessed of a definite doctrine and of deeply rooted convictions upon it will be in a much better position to deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs than those who are merely taking short views, and indulging their natural impulses as they are evoked by what they read from day to day.” In The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), Richard Weaver speaks of the Whig Party and its lack of principles in his argument that the Republicans will not be able to prevail over the Democrats without some fundamental grounding: “Other parties take their bearing from some philosophy of man and society; the Whigs take their bearing from the other parties. Whatever a party of the left or right proposes, they propose (or oppose) in tempered measure. Its politics is then cautionary, instinctive, trusting more to safety and to present success than to imagination and dramatic boldness of principle. It is, to make the estimate candid, a politics without vision, and consequently without the capacity to survive.”
I mention these (among many) not to diminish your argument but to support
it. This stuff is critical. I think about it a lot. I teach about it,
write about it and was delighted to see your first-rate work.