On having no place to go:

[Democrats] believe that most "progressive movement" activists will actually do what they did during the last election - berate anyone who floats the idea that movement organizing and carrot-and-stick treatment of the Democratic Party during election time is actually a good thing. They believe, in short, that come 2010, we'll all fall in line and be an ATM machine of partisan campaign contributions and candidate volunteer time because we are still very much organized as a party, not a movement.

And here's the thing: Except for a few fleeting primaries, most of recent history suggests their calculation is right.

If we want to avoid this kind of thing in the future, we better understand why this happened. Because if we don't, and somehow still expect "change we can believe in," we're epitomizing Albert Einstein's "definition of insanity" - we're "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Geez, David, trying to learn lessons from recent history makes one a loathsome dead-ender. It's OK for us worst- bloggers-on-the-internet types, sure, but do you really want to recommend such behavior to polite company?