Be a proud progressive if you want to win

Following up on this post, see Hartmann on being true to one's progressive values if you want to win elections. A few excerpts:

"There is a lesson here for American liberals if they care to listen. And that’s the fact that they should never, ever, ever, tack to the right to win elections. Doing so is a surefire way to actually lose elections, as Canada’s NDP found out the hard way on Monday.

"American Democrats should know the feeling. In last year’s midterms a good number of Democrats ran away from president Obama and his accomplishments and tried to pass themselves off as Republican-lite. Remember Allison Lundergan Grimes running ads on TV saying that she disagreed with Obama?

"And what happened? They lost their elections and Republicans took over the Senate. The frustrating part of all this was that when Democrats did run as Democrats last fall, they won. Senators Al Franken of Minnesota, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Gary Peters of Michigan, for example, all ran as tried-and-true progressives and handily beat their Republican challengers. This shouldn’t be that hard that to understand: Democrats win elections when they run as progressives."