Democrats bashing Moore

Matt Taibbi at alternet has a great piece on how factions of the democratic party are blaming Michael Moore for Kerry's loss. The Democratic Leadership Council has decided that Moore and "Hollywood liberals" (and we should be very afraid when the left starts blindly adopting the epithets of the far-right) are dragging down the democrats. Taibbi, speaking about Moore's "Farenheit 911," points out that

...it was, according to exit polls, a much better demographic success than the actual Democratic party. A Harris poll conducted in July found that 89 percent of Democrats agreed with "Fahrenheit 9/11," along with 70 percent of independents. That means Moore outperformed John Kerry among independents by about 19 points, if we are to go just by the data presented by bum-licking power-worshipper Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times at the DLC roundtable.

This worries me a great deal. Michael Moore is *exactly* the kind of voice (a pro-labor, class-conscious, patriotic critic of the media, unchecked corporate power, and senseless war) we on the left should be embracing. Why do democrats think they can win by out-republicaning the republicans? At every turn, dems run to the right, thinking they can pull a Reagan and attract voters from the other side. What Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich recognize is that there's a humongous segment of the population (lots of working people, lots of underemployed and disenfranchised individuals) that doesn't vote--tap them, not the knuckleheads who think that critical thinking and social commentary are marks of anti-Americanism.

Some democrats and progressives are making a similar mis-step in terms of looking at Bush's popularity with "religious" voters, concluding, for example, that the left needs to prove its own viability as a choice for voters who've "got religion." Leave organized religion and religious beliefs out of the political sphere. You want a society whose public policy is based on religious beliefs? So does the Taliban.