The despot bloggers of the left

Kimberly Strassel:

Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar is today fond of quoting a famous Lyndon Johnson line: "You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals only eat their enemies."

Mr. Cuellar would know, having found himself the main course on liberals' election menu just last year. A centrist Democrat who is pro-business, free-trade and strong on law enforcement, the congressman was designated an apostate by the left-wing Netroots crowd. They decamped to his district and bankrolled a liberal primary challenger. Mr. Cuellar triumphed, though Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas would later swagger on his blog: "So we didn't kill off Cuellar. But we gave him a whooping where none was expected and made him sweat."

Which is the point. If the liberal blogging phenomenon deserves to be known for anything, it is the strategy to intimidate or silence anyone who disagrees with its own out-of-the-mainstream views. That muzzling has been on full display in recent weeks as Mr. Moulitsas and fellow online speech police have launched a campaign against the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. DLC Chairman Harold Ford, Jr. was even thwacked last week for daring to speak to this editorial page (my sincere apologies, Mr. Ford)--the clear goal to discourage him from making such a free-speech mistake again.

Yet a lively midweek chat with Mr. Cuellar suggests that this campaign of threats isn't necessarily having the intended effect. If anything, it might be backfiring. "They win when they intimidate people," says Mr. Cuellar. "I've taken everything they've thrown, plus their kitchen sink, and I still stand proud as a moderate-conservative Democrat." He says his triumph over blogger fire has only strengthened his conviction that his party will only win elections if it continues to be a "big tent" open to all views. "To make that tent smaller, to force people--not to persuade, but to force, because these are threats--to quiet down, that's destructive in the long term and the short term."

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It says something about what is wrong with the Democrat Party that it is people like Cuellar who are standing up to the bully bloggers of the left and not the parties leaders who have done a complete kowtow. Yet is people like Cuellar who have given the Democrats their margin of victory in 2006. Without the 50 or so conservative Democrats, Pelosi and Reid would still be minority leaders. The challenge for these conservatives will be to convince their voters that voting for people like Pelosi and Reid for leadership positions is in their interest. That is going to be a tough enough sell, and the bully bloggers of the left are just making it tougher.

The bloggers on the left need to get beyond insults and intimidation as a governing argument, unless they are trying to imitate Putin.