In the wake of the election, progressive movements and their members are debating what went wrong. Some say the media amplified the bizarre statements of the Tea Party. Still others argue that Obama didn't offer sufficient leadership or remind us what he had actually achieved during his first 18 months in office. Many blame no one, knowing that midterm elections bring a backlash, regardless of who is in power.

All of these are basically true. But something gets lost in this wringing of hands or resigned acceptance of inevitable defeat. Barack Obama ignited a hope for change and then squandered the opportunity -- right in the middle of high unemployment, terrible economic anxiety, and widespread fear of a declining America -- to hold tightly to the terms of debate that vaulted him to power and might have resulted in many fewer Democratic losses.

But he is not alone. Progressives all over the country sat back for 18 months without pushing him to guard those terms of debate, namely those of equality, fairness, decency, and a society that must depend on the state to protect the poor and the vulnerable. During his presidency, FDR confided to unions and progressive activists that they had to "force" him to do things that would be politically unacceptable. Progressives didn't do that during the last eighteen months. Had they pushed much, much harder, we might have kept more people in their homes, and had a national jobs program that would have softened the terror of having no livelihood.

It is true that Obama faced an obstructionist Republican Senate minority. But he would have changed the terms of debate if he had allowed Republicans to filibuster and read telephone books for two weeks over the question of taxes. Imagine the spectacle. Americans would have perked up their ears, a new national conversation could have eclipsed the Tea Party, and many people would have agreed that the wealthy didn't need tax cuts and that they should expire.

History reminds us that any social movement that changes the terms of debate will eventually change the national conversation.

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We just deployed some code that should fix the Dashboard issues you've been experiencing. If you're still seeing a blank Dashboard, please let me know.

Josh is in Washington, D.C. today speaking at the New America Foundation.

He'll be talking with The Washington Note publisher and Cafe contributor Steve Clemons. You can watch a live stream of the 5:15 - 6:15 EST event here.

Al noted yesterday the problem with new reader blogs -- the issue should be resolved by tomorrow morning around 11 a.m. EST. Existing reader bloggers should still be able to post.

I'd also like to introduce you to a status blog Al set up for future cases where something may go wrong with the site and we are unable to post on our own reader blogs -- or even Cafe main -- to update you. Bookmark it! I'm sure it'll come in handy.

We are currently experiencing a server capacity issue that affects all new signups, effectively preventing them from being able to blog. This shouldn’t affect those with existing accounts (unless you signed up recently). If you encounter a too many links error during your TPM session, you are affected. We are working to resolve the issue, and will keep you updated.

By now the internal combustion of the national Republican party is clearly evident. The fringe has overtaken the center, led in part by a powerful alliance of religion and politics. Journalist Max Blumenthal has been chronicling this takeover meticulously -- and TPMCafe is pleased to feature his latest book, Republican Gomorrah, in the Book Club discussion this week. Max is currently a senior writer at The Daily Beast and a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute.

His book has particular resonance right now, as talk turns to the 2010 elections. Though Republicans hope for next year to be a repeat of 1994, it remains to be seen whether or not they can keep it together: a Rasmussen poll last week showed the strength of the so-called 'Tea Party' against the GOP.

Joining the discussion this week are Frederick Clarkson, co-founder of Talk To Action, a website dedicated to reporting on and discussing the religious right; Sarah Posner, associate editor at Religion Dispatches where she covers the messy intersections of faith and politics; Adele Stan, Washington bureau chief of AlterNet; and Todd Gitlin, regular Cafe contributor, author of The Bulldozer And The Big Tent (among others), and professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Some miscellaneous updates and answers to questions about TPMCafe below the fold.

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We have recently done some work on the TPM backend to improve the login and email delivery systems. You should always receive confirmation emails from us when you sign up for an account or change your password, and you shouldn't be logged out when browsing the site, leaving comments and posting to Reader Blogs within one session. Though we've tried to squash as many of these bugs as we can find, I'd like to know what your experience has been in the past few weeks. Please leave a comment here if you're still seeing either of these issues.

So, the internet is exploding this morning with the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The President says he's "humbled," some pundits say he should turn it down, everyone's got an opinion. What's yours?

Thread away.

This Times piece makes wonderful Memorial Day reading.

Donna Reed was a beautiful and famous actress in the 1940's. She was the mom in "It's A Wonderful Life" and, for boomers like me, Jeff and Mary's mom on "The Donna Reed Show in the 1960's."

But, apparently, for Yanks overseas during the war, she was one of the biggest pin-up stars.

And they wrote her letters, thousands of letters of which she saved a few hundred. Her family did us all a favor by releasing them to the Times for Memorial Day. They serve as a reminder of what young American boys were like two generations ago. Their innocence seems both lovely and incredible.

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A few days ago I spoke with a group of TPM regulars about the possibility of opening one or more chat rooms at TPMCafe for more real time discussions. An update after the jump ...

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As you may have heard, the President is now reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a novel about playing cricket in New York, and the American Dream, and so forth. Excellent choice, POTUS. We here at Cafe also love Netherland, and you can check out our book club discussion of it last summer here. Enjoy.

Liaquat Ahamed joins us this week at Book Club for a discussion of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World. An economic history of the liquidity crisis from 1914 through the Great Depression, Ahamed focuses on four central bankers and their larger-than-life personalities: Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of Banque de France, Hjalmar Schacht of Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Lords of Finance details the four men's attempts to return the economy to the gold standard - and how a series of bad decisions brought the four major banks (and their respective economies) to the brink of collapse.

Ahamed's work is particularly relevant today - in a TPMTV interview last month, he compared the current regulatory environment to the one in place during the 1920s and 1930s.

Joining the discussion are James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin; Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Clinton and Senior Fellow for the New York University Center on Law and Security; Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University; Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon; and Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network.

Clay Risen joins us this week to blog on his book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, an account of the riots that raged across the country in April 1968. The narrative delves into each individual riot and explores the broader impact of violence on the American public. Risen also details the efforts of President Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael to curb the simmering rage.

From Risen's first post:

Why the King riots were so important in American history: Namely, they were a signal moment for so many white Americans that postwar liberalism had failed to ensure domestic order, even as it had pushed further on racial integration than many whites-in and outside the South-were comfortable with.

Risen is currently the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Previously, he was assistant editor at The New Republic and has written for The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Slate, and the Atlantic.

Joining the conversation are Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation; Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; Peniel Joseph, Professor of African-American Studies at Brandeis University; and Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University and regular TPMCafe contributor.

This week at Cafe we have Matt Miller with us, book clubbing on The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. In it he dissects a series of conventional ideas - on education, free trade, health coverage, taxes - that are out of date and threaten our nation. From Matt's opening post (to go up shortly):

The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits).

Matt Miller is co-host of public radio's Left, Right & Center, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and author of The Two Percent Solution.

Joining him are Robert Litan, expert on antitrust, banking, and internet policy at the Brookings Institution and Kauffman Foundation; Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for TIME Magazine; Jeff Madrick, editor of Challenge Magazine; Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good; Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute.

Escalation in Afghanistan, drawdown in Iraq, instability in Pakistan, dialogue with Iran; relations between the United States and the Muslim World are at a height of complexity and intensity. This week at Book Club, we will be joined by Juan Cole who will be discussing his new book Engaging the Muslim World. Cole hashes out where we are, where we've been, and what the future could like in relations between the the United States and the Muslim World. Juan Cole is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of the blog Informed Comment.

He will be joined by Patricia DeGennaro, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute; Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University; Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and MJ Rosenberg, regular Cafe contributor.

This week at Book Club, we have Robert J. Norrell, history professor at the University of Tennessee, discussing his work Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. The book is the first full-length biography of Booker T. Washington in some time and re-examines the life and controversial strategies of this leader of the African-American community. Among the topics given renewed attention are the huge influence Washington wielded in the black community and larger American society and the precarious position he occupied between white supremacists on one side and competing black leaders on the other.

Joining him are Joe Lowndes, political science professor at the University of Oregon; Jane Shaw, President of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy; Ralph Luker, history teacher and author on race and on religion; and Bruce Kleinschmidt, attorney and librarian. Join us!

This week at book club, Greg Mitchell editor of Editor & Publisher and author of So Wrong for So Long joins us for a discussion of his latest, Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008.

As he remarks in his opening post (up shortly):

But more than anything the book explores the profound influence of what we'll call, in shorthand, "new media" in propelling Obama to victory. Obama, with the help of an unprecedented grassroots funding and organizing effort, battled the Clinton machine to a standstill, then knocked out McCain a few months later. This was the first national campaign profoundly shaped -- even, at times, dominated -- by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went "mainstream" to startling online fundraising techniques.

You might call it Campaign 2.008.

Joining him are Randall Wray, economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; David Shorr, expert in national security strategy and the US role in the world at the Stanley Foundation; Michael Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nick Katzenbach, Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson; and D.D. Guttenplan, writer for The Nation. Come by and weigh in.

Hugo Chavez, Moqtada Al-Sadr, Sen. Joe McCarthy, George W. Bush: charismatic mass leaders, and democracy's most dangerous enemies? This week at Cafe, we have a Book Club discussion on Michael Signer's Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. In it, he explores the history of the rise of popular leaders and the threats they pose to the democracies that produce them.

Signer was Foreign Policy Advisor on Sen. John Edwards presidential campaign and he is Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress and Senior National Security Policy Fellow at Third Way.

Joining him are Rachel Kleinfeld, co-founder and Executive Director of the Truman National Security Project; Heather Hurlburt, speechwriter and policy advisor in the Clinton Administration; Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Matt Dallek, professor at the University of California Washington Programme. See you there!

This week, we've got Will Bunch with us to blog American myth making vis-a-vis Reagan in our latest book club discussion. Bunch's new book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future examines the yarns that have been spun about President Reagan, the actual strengths based in truth, and the continuing shadow which President Reagan and his mythical specter casts over our nation. Or, as Will puts it in his opening post, up shortly, "Seriously, you didn't think the myth of Ronald Reagan would be wiped away in one election cycle, did you?"

Bunch is a Senior Writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 with the New York Newsday staff. He is also the author of Jukebox America. You can read his blog Attytood at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/.

Joining the conversation are Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland; Kyle Longley, professor of history at Arizona State University; Stephen Knott, professor of political science at U.S. Naval War College; Douglas Kmiec, professor at Pepperdine University School of Law; and Michael A. Cohen, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. As always, join us!

This week at Cafe, Eric Rauchway is joining us for a book club discussion on his latest, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. This is a great series, and I think this book in particular does an excellent job of laying out the details of the Great Depression and The New Deal in a timely, readable, and highly relevant way.

Eric Rauchway is a History Professor at UC Davis and he specializes in US political, cultural, and intellectual history. His previous works include Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (2003) and The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900-1920 (2001).

Joining him are James K. Galbraith, economist and professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and University of Texas at Austin; Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkeley; Susan Feiner, professor of economics and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine; Mark Thoma, associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon; Anthony Badger, professor of history at Cambridge University; Jason Scott Smith, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico; and Julian Zelizer, professor at Princeton University.

This week at Cafe we have Andrew Bacevich with us to book club blog on his latest book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. The book examines the citizenry's complicity in the current economic, political, and military crisis. Bacevich is a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and a retired army colonel. His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002), The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003) (editor), The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), and The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy since World War II (2007) (editor).

Joining him are Michael Hollerich, professor at the University of St. Thomas; Michael Klare, professor at Hampshire College; Michael Lind, a Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nathan Newman, the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; David Shorr, a program officer in policy analysis and dialogue at the Stanley Foundation; and Tony Smith, a professor at Tufts University.

So, it's a pretty special week. And here at Cafe we're going to be delving into some of the excitement with two week long discussions-- each gazing in a different direction from this very particular point in history. In conjunction with Democracy Journal we'll be hosting a conversation about Obama's America. After eight years of Bush Administration malfeasance, we'll be examining where America stands, as measured by the values that define our nation, and what that means for the Obama Administration going forward. Over at book club, we'll be looking back-- to the first hundred days of FDR's administration.

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