I'd like to echo Mark Schmitt's strong recommendation of the book, to start with. I'd been hearing about the book for months from various D.C. insiders before I finally sat down with it. Some of them disliked it intensely, and were just thrilled to predict to me how unfavorable the reception for this book would be. (I love this town -- total snakepit.) In retrospect, that prediction looks about as accurate as the predictions of Howard Dean's invincibility Beltway insiders made in Fall 2003.

The Argument is a great read, pure and simple. It carries you along with all the momentum of a thriller, even though you know going in the outcome of its suspenseful narrative. It is filled with so many acute, illuminating observations about the insurgent progressive movement's key players that I'm quite sure some will never again feel comfortable in Bai's presence, for fear of what is going on behind those dark green eyes of his. Indeed, there is so much in the book that I didn't know about various actors, such as the Democracy Alliance's Rob Stein, that I felt at times while reading it like someone had accidentally given me the secret psychiatrist's files on people I've spent years seeing around town.

The book, however, left me with one big question.

Reviewers, including the discussants on this site, have largely praised the book's portraits and reporting, but taken issue with Bai's broader argument that the Democratic Party lacks an argument for itself. In my own reading of the book, though, it seems clear to me -- as I think Matt has tried a bit to clarify on this site -- that that insistent voice asking, "What next? Where do we go from here?" that recurs throughout the narrative is as much Andy Stern's as Bai's own. Though the book does not take Stern as its central figure, it is Stern's push to reshape union politics for the new economy and push to reshape the Democratic Party for the new century that I hear Bai sympathizing with more than any other insurgent effort, and that's saying something, since he describes himself as feeling a respectful affection and admiration for many of the new players.

My question, both to Bai and to the other discussants, is whether the changes Stern has advocated -- his push for a new argument and agenda -- have begun to materialize, and whether we are starting to see the first glimmers of the new Democratic argument being laid out on the campaign trail this election cycle.

For example, the Democratic candidates this cycle all have agreed in principle that they ought to propose and support universal healthcare coverage. This might not seem new, but it is fact a shift to a consensus position that did not exist in, say, 2002, when the Democrats were narrowly focused on the question of prescription drug coverage, or even in 2004, when John Edwards derided John Kerry's health care reform proposals as too ambitious. Further, the Democrats, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, seem to have temporarily given up what to many voters was the impossible (or impossibly scary) dream of national health insurance in favor of a public-private patchwork that fills the gaps in the system but leaves the majority of American who are already insured or satisfied with the present system unperturbed. This consensus probably would not have emerged had not Stern's SEIU demanded it as a precondition for considering the candidates for an endorsement.

Second, though he emerges as a figure in the book only on two pages of the 306-page volume, former Vice President Al Gore, through his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, has transformed the nation's understanding of the environment. We may have witnesses the Death of Environmentalism, but Gore has birthed something even more significant: a new international awareness of the coming climate change crisis. Where Gore has played the role of visionary hero and evangelist, the Democratic candidates for president this election cycle are starting to turn his vision into a policy agenda for the American economy and for global sustainability. When John Edwards tells an audience in a declining industrial town on the fringes of Iowa life about the new hope a "green economy" might give them, he is laying out a cause that can bring new hope to the world and to their community alike. Instead of building washing machines in Iowa, they can build wind turbines, which they can then stand tall within their corn fields, helping America become energy-independent while also helping themselves to a middle-class lifestyle. Hillary Clinton, too, has made "green jobs" a central part of her argument for the new economy, and Barack Obama has laid out powerful ideas for energy independence, some of which owe a lot to the pioneering work of Nordhaus and Schellenberger.

So my question, again, is: Are we starting to see the new argument emerging along with the new infrastructure?