"It Appears That the Left Has Finally Managed to Stop the Rightward Momentum of American Politics"

"All five candidates on the stage, with the partial exception of Jim Webb, set forth a set of unabashedly liberal policies with a feisty anti-conservative attitude that would been shocking just a few political cycles ago. For decades Democratic candidates tripped over each other trying to distance themselves from the dreaded 'L' word. Indeed, they ran so far that they ended up abandoning it altogether.
"The demonizing of the word 'liberal' was one of the most successful campaigns in conservative movement history. It has many fathers, not the least of whom is Newt Gingrich, but the political strategist who gets the most credit for turning the word 'liberal' into an epithet is a man named Arthur Finkelstein. In the wake of the legal earthquake known as Buckley vs Valeo, the Supreme Court case which first unleashed a flood of money into the political system back in 1976, Finkelstein created the first Independent Expenditure PAC, which he recognized could work outside the norms of partisan politics. His strategy was simple: associate Democrats with the word 'liberal' and associate the word 'liberal' with something deviant and un-American. It worked beautifully. By the 1990s, his PAC had been instrumental in deposing a number of Democratic office holders and replacing them with much more conservative Republicans. This had helped to drive what had been the political center inexorably to the right; the Democrats, determined to stay with the center, followed."

Heather Digby Parton in Salon reacts to the first Democratic debate of the 2016 campaign.