Goddam it feels good to be right. This guy is said by some to be one of the best minds in poli-sci right now, so it feels even better to finally see what we've known for some time become so established that even the excreble WaPo has to acknowledge it.

When we combined voters' answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale (answers were divided into five equivalent categories based on overall liberalism vs. conservatism), 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The visual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V.

You don't lead from the middle, you lead from the front. Repeat until even the blockheads in the Democratic party leadership understand this. And I will add: when you lead from the front, you are that much more likely to attract new and previously nonvoting voters. Who, I will remind you, are so much more numerous than the mushy 10% in the middle as to make moot any concern about repeated victory.