On a purely tactical level, I think Senator Clinton is disastrous. As Peter Beinart writes, she's always been a centrist sort. But as Tim Graham makes clear, she'll never get any credit for it from anyone. As with Howard Dean this business of being a lot more moderate than your public image and reputation would suggest is an absolutely terrible situation to be in. We should be looking for the reverse.

What Frank gets, and what Democrats too often don't, is that we fail by nominating candidates who're manifestations of our worst stereotypes.

We nominated, in other words, the perfect aristocrat. Not all aristocrats, after all, are created equal. Some maintain their money and connections without wearing the years spent at cotillion classes on the cufflinks. Kerry wasn't one. And what Franks understands about him is that the frame Kerry tapped into, the heuristics he invoked, destabilized his national security credentials as surely as they invalidated his populism. If the elite liberal, in common imagination, is a relativistic, blame-America-first, out-of-touch perpetuator of a detached upper class, then Kerry, by virtue of having the background and bearing of an elite liberal, was bound by every one of those perceptions. Didn't matter if he had a strong foreign policy and a populist economic agenda, so long as he didn't look the part, neither would be believed.