[No More Liebermans]

Explanatory note.

It occurs to me that if a fellow can't dump the first three chapters to his (brilliant but failed) nonfiction book proposal onto a personal blog, where can he dump it? Since I'll be gone for a week, seems like a good time for the dumping. The notion of the book was to draw on outsiders for advice about where to send the Democratic Party, since obviously insiders had done a pretty poor job of it. Although it garnered much interest, the book was rejected because I wasn't (this is richly ironic) a big enough name. Nor, apparently, were the other six major national bloggers I'd lined up to contribute chapters. Ah well.

This is what I wrote about the book in the proposal:

Following a devastating loss in 2004, everyone on the left will be looking for direction. Instinctively, they’ll resist tired old prescriptions that have delivered only punishing loss after punishing lossThe Party’s energy and future lie with the new ideas and new voices that fueled the antiwar movement, MoveOn.com, and Howard Dean’s campaign.>The book to capture that coiled energy will be poised to become the political must-read in 2006 and beyond. [This book] is a timely and important contribution to liberalism in the age of George W. Bush.

I still believe that. The book was to be called No More Liebermans: Radical Ideas to Save the Democratic Party. Below are the first three chapters, the extant part of the book from the proposal. Obviously, they're grossly long posts. Hey, it'll keep you busy while I'm gone.

• Introduction: Where Do We Go From Here?
• Part One: Blueprint for a Machine
• Part Two: Constituencies

See you in a week.