Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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One of my favorite sites to read the angry words of furious Democratic base voters these days is the New York Times letters page.

Here's a selection from today:

Academics are trained to reason using logic, to question evidence and to consider and evaluate several possible interpretations of events. All these activities are discouraged and indeed ridiculed by the present Republican leadership. Academic Republicans must indeed suffer from this cognitive dissonance.

Markus Meister
Pasadena, Calif., Nov. 18, 2004
The writer is a professor of biology at Harvard.

The view that campus collegiality leads to tyranny of the majority has some plausibility in explaining the absence of Republicans from academia, but the main causes clearly lie elsewhere.

A successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience, along with a lack of interest in material incentives. All these are antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.

John McCumber
Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2004
The writer is a professor of Germanic languages at U.C.L.A.

And from yesterday:

Let those Democratic leaders who think their party should show more religious faith and moderate its stand on abortion know this: If the Democratic Party does so, it will lose millions of lifelong members like me.

Moving to the right is not the answer. The Democrats got 48 percent of the vote in the 2004 presidential election. They don't need to change their positions. They need to take control of the debate, get their voters to the polls and make sure that Republicans don't pull dirty tricks.

If the Democratic Party moves to the right, I will defect to the Green Party, as will many of my friends and family.

Paula Berinstein
Thousand Oaks, Calif.

The Democratic Party needs to forget religion.

The Republican Party, and indeed the country, seems to be falling more every day under the conservative Christian spell. We need a strong opposition, a return to the secular humanism on which our nation was founded.

This doesn't mean that the Democrats should forget about moral issues. They should offer rational solutions without the encumbrance of a particular ideology.

The Democratic Party has historically been the party of inclusion. It shouldn't alienate more voters with Christian rhetoric.

Stephen Teti
North Brunswick, N.J.

It's bad enough that the Democratic Party has tilted as much as it has to date toward Republicanism. Now it wants to shake its secular image?

Do the Democrats really want to win back the Christian right on religious grounds? If we're going to vote religion, which religion do we choose?

Four years from now, members of the (shrinking) middle class may find that their economic circumstances either have not improved or have deteriorated under the leadership of the faith-based president for whom they voted.

Leah Aronoff
Cincinnati

Obviously, we assume that the opinion page editors are selecting a representative sample of letters that come to the New York Times. But it seems like the tone of these letters - "I don't want to reach out to those red state neanderthals" - is the mood among the voters who make up the Democratic party's base.

The James Carvilles of the world, who want the Democrats to head back toward the center, have their work cut out for them.

[Posted 11/22 11:09 AM]