Last Month, Howie Klein, the author of the progressive blog DownWithTyranny! and a frequent critic of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chairman Steve Israel, wrote this piece about freshman Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy, a former Republican who switched to the Democratic Party to run against (and defeat) Allen West last year:
Technically, Patrick Murphy is a Democrat. He switched his registration from "Republican" just before challenging much-hated Tea Party target Allen West in 2012. A son of great wealth and privilege, Murphy was, of course, a lifelong Republican. Since getting into the House he's voted with Republicans on crucial roll calls more frequently than with Democrats. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, he's sold out 100% to the Wall Street banksters and works consistently to help the Republicans seduce weak-minded and cowardly New Dems into joining them in dismantling the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms.
Patrick Murphy is the prototypical example of how Republicans leaving the GOP due to the increasing amount of intolerance to anyone who is not a right-wing extremist within the GOP these days is both a good thing and a bad thing.
The good thing is that it's going to become easier and easier to paint Republicans as out-of-touch extremists if they don't pull themselves back to the center-right. The bad thing is that the Democratic Party is becoming too much of a "big tent" party for its own good. There are people of political views ranging from far-left to center-right within the Democratic Party, and that makes it practically impossible for the Democratic Party to come up with a unifying, positive message.
I'll predict that, sometime in the next several years, one of two things is going to happen which will change this country's political landscape dramatically:
1) Republicans will successfully rebrand themselves to the point that they can win presidential elections.
2) Republicans will continue to act like a far-right political party to the point that they're going to have trouble getting 33 1/3% of the vote in presidential elections. If and when that happens, it's going to be better off for progressives to leave the Democratic Party and form a national Progressive Party, and this website, whose primary goal is to co-opt the progressive movement into the Democratic Party, will live out its usefulness.
Until either of those happen, we're going to be stuck with a Democratic Party that is slowly becoming too big of a tent for its own good.