"Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, and all that.

"One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues” on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

"But there's another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

"I'm not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team's ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

"I'm talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

"And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

"What it says, I'd argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse."

True Democratic activists and bloggers, those of us who experienced and recall the Mondale fiasco and the failed Democratic presidential campaigns that followed every four years except for Bill Clinton's, have been warning the Obama campaign that Americans want real Democrats, traditional Roosevelt fighting Democrats not Dukakis laid back, step all over me, phony bi-partisan so called middle class messages that don't work. 

But it seems the Axelrod-Plouffe team thought they knew best and now its blowback time.

The reality is that Democrats who fail to be strongly assertive, proud of their of, by, and for the people Democratic values, not the rich and corporate Dem Republican lites that seemed to dominate the convention, righteously angry (and boy, if there was ever a time for righteous anger it's now because of what the right wing, reactionary Republican Bush-Cheney crime family has done to this country). 

Quit with the euphemisms and start using the L word.  McSame and Palin are LIARS.  If you're true Democrats, that word shouldn't scare you when you call them out with the truth: These extremist Republicans are LIARS.

Quit with the kumbaya and act like Roosevelt Democrats, act like genuine working class Democrats, act like real Democrats and stop this centrist non-Democratic drivel.    

As Jim Hightower says: "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos."