Daniel Henninger's WSJ column today on ideology hits the nail square on the head.
I don't think the Dems can become a mainstream party again unless they propose mainstream ideas. The United States is a center-right country which is not going to be won over by Howard Dean, Daily Kos, or interest groups protecting a woman's right to kill her unborn baby. Dick Morris's Triangulation worked for Clinton(twice). In a two party system, elections are won in the middle. IF the GOP would just slide a little bit???

The most significant moment in Tuesday evening's State of the Union speech
did not occur while President Bush was speaking. It was just before the speech,
when TV cameras caught the two new Supreme Court justices, John Roberts and
Samuel Alito. They are conservatives. They are what the Republican voting base
wanted on the court and what George Bush promised he would nominate if
elected.

And so today. I don't know if I would call the people running Democratic Web sites such as MoveOn.org or the Daily Kos "young intellectuals," but what they're hungering for can only be called ideology. One might prefer a less fanatic, less foul-mouthed faction than this, and their Democratic principles may seem a tad antique, but the unmistakable fact is that the Web Democrats are ideologues--proudly and defiantly so.
They're insisting that the party nominate a candidate who'll run unashamedly on "progressive ideas." They believe Clintonian triangulation is a sellout. And they matter more than similar ideologues going back to the Trotskyite cells on the Lower East Side because they've proven they can use the Web to raise millions to support or punish Democratic politicians. Even ideologues on the left need capital.