In the process of examining Klein's twisted entrails, Frank divines some key insights into the DINO/DLC mentality:

This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards.

Yep, according to Sniveling Joe, it's the Beltway Consultocracy that steers Dem candidates away from down-home "authenticity" and towards Populist extremism, which, as everyone surely knows, the People will not vote for:

The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base.

I've said it before and I'll repeat myself until I'm nauseous: Thomas Frank is right on. Whassamatta with Kansas should be required reading for all Democrat politicians. Sadly, even if they did read his book, they seem to be ideologically and institutionally opposed to it's conclusions.

But someone needs to rub their faces in the fact that, compared to today’s “polarized” Democratic Party, their lovable old Harry Truman sounds like a fire-breathing anarchist, defending positions so far to the left that we have forgotten that one of the two major parties ever held them. Maybe what ails us isn’t a deficit of authenticity or the pull of the poles; maybe it’s something Truman would have grasped in a Kansas City minute: the power of money, the push of the right. Maybe squishy centrism is the problem, not the solution.

Word.