TPM Cafe has been one of several venues to host the ongoing debate over ideas between between Ken Baer and Andrei Cherny, on the one hand, and Jon Chait on the other. Baer and Cherny's journal launched the same week as an incredibly super-fantastic new online magazine, The Democratic Strategist. Oh, did I mention I'm the managing editor? Guess I should disclose that. The Strategist is a project of three analysts who are even more well-known than I: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, who serve as co-editors. They each bring formidable experience and expertise to the venture, as well as their own very different perspectives on Democratic politics.
Unlike Democracy, the Strategist focuses on politics rather than ideas -- so just back off, Chait. The Strategist aims to build a long-term Democratic majority by subjecting to data the myriad electoral strategies proposed by various factions of the party. We are not aligned with any of those factions; our only allegiance is to the facts. But we are proudly partisan, so all you Indepedent and Republican readers of TPM Cafe, don't say we didn't warn you.
The Strategist fills an important niche in Democratic politics. Quality research that is relevant to political strategy is published routinely by political scientists and other academics, but among professional Democrats that research has all the influence of the USA Today Sudoku puzzle. On the other hand, opinion journals are for the most part oriented around rhetoric rather than data. The Strategist aims to bring research to bear on the conventional wisdom, contrarianism, and meme-floating found in popular political magazines and on blogs.
What will you find on our website? For starters, there is the "magazine" itself, published on a regular basis and featuring pieces from academic researchers, pollsters, consultants, political operatives, Congressional staff, think tank experts, and leading advocates within the Democratic Party. Each issue also features commentary on the pieces from the three editors. Reflecting our commitment to diverse viewpoints, the premiere issue features essays by Jerome Armstrong, Robert Borosage, Donna Brazile, Elaine Kamarck, Will Marshall, Harold Meyerson, John Wilhelm, and Baer and Cherny themselves.
To tide you over between issues, we feature additional content. We will soon be debuting the first of our roundtable discussions, where contributors will debate articles from the magazine or stand-alone pieces. The site also features The Daily Strategist, a blog with lots of character featuring yours truly, contributors from Ruy's Donkey Rising blog, and soon guest posts by Party insiders. Matt Yglesias raved that it was "rapidly becoming a vital -- and all-too-unbloggish -- source of actual empirical information". He also said, "Better than Cats!" (OK, not really. But we are better than Cats.)
Eventually, the Strategist website will also host forums (fora?) for its readers who are interested in specific topics, such as Latino electoral strategies or rural voters. Indeed, we hope to become the premier site where all segments and factions of the Democratic Party will congregate to develop more successful political strategies.
So check it out, and give us your feedback. In the meantime, I'm going to channel our president and Zell Miller and preemptively challenge Jon Chait to a duel at sundown. If, however, he links to us, he can avert this tragic and preventable altercation.
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