His basic complaint with all three seems to be that it's not okay for a person to write a book which says that the Republican Party has won a lot of elections recently despite the fact that it would be better if they had lost.

I would put Bai's basic complaint differently, which is that it's not okay to write a book which says that the Republican Party has won a lot of elections recently despite the fact that they should have lost based on their positions and voter's true preferences.

Bai assumes, a priori that elections results are an accurate indication of voter preferences.  Accordingly, for Bai any theory that describes and explains a disconnect between the two must be wrong.  It does not matter how sophisticated or factually supported these theories are, Bai's faith in the centrality of ideas in American politics trumps any evidence.

Bai is right that Democrats should greet skeptically simplistic, silver-bullet panaceas to their problems.  Of course they need to do more than simply "stick to their guns" or "stand for something."  But its equally naiive to suggest that each Democratic defeat is a "lesson from the people" regarding  specific issues or policy positions. 

Bai is apparently working on a book that will end with a series of ideas on how the Democrats can get "more in line" with the mainstream preferences of American voters.  Given his middle school civics assumptions of American Politics, the odds that he'll have any insight that even approaches that of Lakoff or Hacker/Pierson is highly unlikely.

 

What Bai wants is for Democrats to admit that they've been very, very bad little boys and girls, apologize, bow and scrape before the American people, and then get busy implementing Bai's recommendations.

Their refusal to display the proper degree of humility infuriates him.

The comment above is an ignorant comment. Neither Frank nor Lakoff "whine." If this poster means that Democrats should mindlessly pander and triangulate, that doesn't seem to have produced lasting results, either.

Sure, the Dems need to do a lot more grassroots work. That's just one piece of picture. 

As far as simplistic summaries of the theses of the books mentioned (I haven't read Off Center yet), Bai seems pretty on, if clearly connoting negativity.  I mean, there's a lot of anecdotes and various historical analyses and facts and whatnot in "Kansas", but the upshot of it all pretty much IS that rural voters are either too unsophisticated to recognize they've been had or are at least so fanatical on their couple key cultural issues that they're willing to be taken along for a ride by the Republican establishment cause they still believe, after 40 years of failure, that eventually it'll let them establish the American theocracy they dream of.  Now I tend to agree with much of that thesis, but I don't think Bai necessarily is misrepresenting the book.

I think the discussion is in some ways too ungenerous to Bai and yet in the point that matters most way too forgiving. The point's not that Bai considers griping about losing sour grapes, but what he thinks Democrats need to do to deliver what Americans really want.

As the authors, in their preview, put it, Bai does agree with much of what they say. He also emphasizes in his disagreement Bush's mileage from 9/11, which rescued him from an unpopular presidency; that was a big theme of TPM posters on the book, too, and the authors conceded it as well. I'm also not seeing the evidence that Bai is boasting of American preferences for Bush.

But rather, it comes down to Bai's long-running theme, that Democrats need to move right, which is where he thinks Americans are. It was the theme most recently of his infuriating article about Clinton as a 2008 candidate. I heart him saying that good people (like him, no doubt) still hate her, so she's still a not unlikely loser, but she's showing the Democrats how to stop acting like (gosh) liberals.

Given this, it's hardly surprising that he skips past the heart of the book as fast as he humanly can, since otherwise he'd have to face the data proving him wrong about American beliefs. That's why he takes the book to be predominantly about the pressures shaping voter cognitive dissonance rather than the dissonance itself.

Bai assumes, a priori that elections results are an accurate indication of voter preferences.  Accordingly, for Bai any theory that describes and explains a disconnect between the two must be wrong.

This is right, I think.  I don't particularly enjoy piling onto poor, mediocre Matt Bai, but this is very typical inside-the-beltway (eg Joe Klein)/NYT middlebrow thinking.  If this simple formula wasn't available to him, Bai's job would suddenly become much much harder - he'd have to actually deal with the issues raised by Frank, et. al.  Institutions like the NYT have a pronounced stake in maintaning this gray, humorless, obtuse way of thinking/writing: it makes the institution seem lofty and authoritative.  And they do actively foster it.  If Mr Bai's magazine pieces appeared in other venues, would we talk about them as much as we do?  We probably wouldn't talk about them much at all, because they are unremarkable in themselves.

This style is no more valid than - and is just the same, in kind - as the trick of being reflexively cynical so as to seem 'smarter'.  

Do we all know that a high school principal in Kansas suspended a student last week because she was speaking Spanish? I don't know why. but I can guess.

[Bai] just thinks many Dems have been woeful failures at politics the last few years and tries to understand why and to investigate approaches that might rectify the situation.

I agree that Mr Bai is not willfully malign (although he can be rather sniffy, but that's his job, after all).  The problem is that his master isn't his own imagination or developing vision so much as it is the Standard Liberalism of the NYT, which I would contend is a debilitatingly rigid two-way reflection of recent feckless Democratic politics.  Bai is as clueless as the pols he wags his carefully occluded finger at.  The Times has an unfortunate symbiotic relationship with both liberals and with its rhetorical stormtrooper-critics who identify it as the Locus of Liberalism  - the NYT wants to be that, insists on it, in fact.  This latter fact has been horrible for liberals and progressives for decades, not just the last few years.  The NYT is a great paper, but the more overweening it is, explicitly on its editorial and feature side, the crappier it is.  It's a newspaper/media org which has become an institution, and shouldn't be the reverse: an institution which happens to be a newspaper.

It's a fact too icky for the 'Times to confront without irony or, depending on the day, without post 9/11 lack-of-irony: much as regular people claim to hate politics, regular people who vote actually love them some politics, and they vote for politicians who give it to them, who pay attention to them now and then, even if only to exploit their (understandable) fears.  At least Republicans pay enough attention to pander intelligently.  Because Dems pretend that they are above pandering, they do it poorly, and catch much more hell for minor infractions than the GOP does for outrageous ones.

Meanwhile, back at the liberal ranch, the latest Thrty Point Plan has failed on election day, and the Times will reason that the Plan simply needs to be modified in a more centerist direction to gain majority support.  Of course the reality of the election was that few in the majority even really noticed the liberal Plan, so it wasn't really rejected - it was ignored.

I don't think my view of significant parts of the electorate, as stated above, is either cynical nor condesending.  It's a perfectly rational way for people who feel powerless to behave, especially these days.  Shall we wring our hands about the transformation of politics into something more like entertainment (as if that were really something new)?  How usefull!  Then, like Howard Dean recently, we could be self-rightously right, and powerless our ownselves.

BTW, I don't mean to dis Matt Bai as a person.  I know nothing about him other than what I learn reading his turgid pieces.  He just strikes me as having a quality the feature side of the NYT values more than brilliance: malleability to the NYT style - and I don't mean just the 'stylebook', but also the mode of thinking.

Off Center doesn't bother with issue intensity when trying to measure the center.  They treat feelings about foreign policy as precisely as weighty as feelings on gay marriage.  That is a huge flaw and it taints their research at every turn.