For the Record

For the longest time (ok, maybe like 4.5 years), I've been meaning to dig up this exact quote by Charlie Peters, from his Tilting At Windmills column ...

I WAS TOUCHED BY THE MANY tributes to Paul Wellstone, especially by those from conservatives like David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Fred Barnes, and Robert Novak. But there was one theme that ran through the praise that I found disturbing. It was that he was a "pure liberal" or "honest liberal," never a "New Democrat" or "moderate" My friend and former colleague Timothy Noah asks in Slate, "Can't a New Democrat or a neoliberal be just as true to his beliefs as Wellstone was to his?" True, some of us may be in the center out of cowardice or cynicism. But isn't it also possible that some of us are there because of our beliefs? Just because our principles may be a mixture of conservative, liberal, and middle-of-the-road, it doesn't mean that our convictions are any less strong or pure or honest.

December 2002 issue of Washington Monthly, to be precise.