The Point is to Defeat Bush, Mr. Brooks.

David Brooks, the conservative NYTimes columnist who can hardly be considered an interested commentator more than a jeering sideliner in the Democratic nomination process, wrote a column this week mocking the Democrat's shift back and forth between Dean and Kerry on the basis of wanting to put forward someone who is "electable": (Electing the Electable). Some Democrats are decrying that much of the discussion is centering around personality and temperment -- rather than a hardheaded comparison of ideas -- worrying that the Democratic Primaries are not a substantive process of discriminating between the candidates' positions. These criticisms are cut from the same cloth: they allege that the lack of hard-headed discussion of health-care plans, economic policy, foreign policy, education policy reveals a Democratic party weak on ideas, and unable to muster intellectual ability to convince voters of their superiority to what Bush has to offer.

This ignores the obvious cause: the difference between any two of the Democratic front-runners (Kerry, Dean, Clark and Edwards) is tiny compared to the difference between any of them and George Bush -- a president who has lied to his country to send us to a war he wanted to have since day 1, regardless of how we felt about it; who cut taxes to the rich while burdening us with a $500B deficit, and probably $1Trillion in new debt, and shifted the tax burden so that the payoff to the wealthy is being made by the middle class; who permits crony capitalism in his White House, with a $1Billion no-bid contract to Haliburton to provide services in Iraq, who still has his Vice-President on its payroll, even as they stole $61Million of taxpayer money; and who introduces astounding $1Trillion dollar shoot to Mars in a cynical "starve the beast" ploy of loading government with economic burdens; who -- for the first time in our history -- violates our constitution and holds Americans in prison without appeal to the courts or access to attorneys; who permits members of his administration to out CIA operatives in an illegal ploy to intimidate the administration's critics; who cynically pushes education reform, to pretend he's doing somthing, and then robs it of the funding he proposed so that it cannot be carried out, so that he gets the credit for pushing education reform while people ignore that he sabotaged it so that he can tell his conservative backers that he didn't grow government; then he does the same exact thing, pushing expensive and ineffective Medicare reform which will make rich pharmeceutical companies and insurers, before telling people that it will cost much more than he had said, and you can bet he won't fund it, just like "No Child Left Behind", so that Medicare "withers on the vine", in Gingrich's famous phrase.

The question Democrats face this primary season is not to split hairs over which of their health-care plans is better. The question they face is to figure out which among them has the armor to go up against a $300M strong Bush re-election machine, and his self-motivated hangers-on who are not burdened by ethical concerns about playing dirty. And who among them has that instinct to use the issues that people care about -- and how Bush's administration has used the country with the whim and compassion of a Monarch.

I, for one, am glad the Dem's are not bloodletting each other -- and that we are talking about temperment, hair styles, and character. The real battle is not between Democrats, whose differences are tiny; the real battle is between Democrats and Bush. That's the battle to fight. And we need the best fighter to do it. So the main question to be answered in the primaries is: who can beat Bush best? And so, Democrats' discussions center on this, rather than fighting among ourselves, because any Democrat in the Presidency will be better for the country than 4 more years of Bush.

That's why we're talking about electing the electable, Mr. Brooks. It does not reveal the weakness of the Democratic party -- it reveals a unity of purpose.