Having just gotten the email welcoming us to this site and its “beyond left and right” self-description, I feel a little self-conscious in wondering whether or not the “not necessarily conservative” refers to me.  Let me therefore attempt to define myself – God help me! – in 300 words or less.

In my heart of hearts I am a Norman Thomas socialist, which undoubtedly makes me the youngest old socialist at 24, the point being that in this day and age this places me far closer to The American Conservative than The American Prospect.

With respect to the title, three years ago I was excited about Daily Kos et al when they were championing unconventional Democrats like Jim Webb and Jon Tester, but I was ruefully disappointed when they revealed themselves in the last election cycle to be a new species of the same old loony liberal obsessed with the usual boogeymen.

I voted for Obama without reservation, and stand by that decision, but I certainly drank heavily of the ambrosia of the Ron Paul Revolution.  I guess I still hold out the hope he will prove himself to have been Norman Thomas to Obama’s FDR.

This article about my junior senator articulates better than I could why I still feel there’s hope for the Obamacon position, as well as illustrating better than I ever could the ugliness that repels me from the liberal blogosphere.  We Webb-Gillibrand Democrats in the age of Obama follow in a fine tradition including the Liberal Republicans who thwarted Reconstruction and such great dissenting Democrats of the 30s as Al Smith and Burton Wheeler.

If ours is a tradition of beautiful losers, our comfort is in the fact that our church militant adversaries from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace never got very far either, and I trust neither will Daily Kos, HuffPo, and Wonkette.