Please don't punch the hippies

After Russ Feingold lost his Senate seat last night, a political blogger on Twitter harrumphed:  "So, did Russ Feingold lose because he wasn't progressive enough?" Oh god, here we go again. Punch the hippies. Blame them for the coming Republican apocalypse. Chasten them for believing progressive policies would work if Democrats would just give them a try. If they would just go out and sell them, take their own side in a fight, maybe they'd defy the midterm odds.

But was Feingold's loss a rebuke to this belief?

"No, he lost because the Senate wasn't progressive enough," I told the blogger, named Yeggo. "He's just the scapegoat for failed policies."

Joan Walsh of Salon apparently agrees:

Strangely, I watched Democrats including MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell try to blame the blowout on whiny progressives. O'Donnell asked Rachel Maddow why Wisconsin stalwart Sen. Russ Feingold lost, if the diagnosis of many lefties was that less wimpy Democrats might have done better in this sad midterm, given that he was arguably the least wimpy Democrat in this cycle.

My answer would have been: Russ Feingold and other progressives who lost weren't really tested fairly. They weren't able to run on the results of their own political priorities, like a robust stimulus that might have created more jobs, or more aggressive healthcare reform that might have solved more people's real-life problems and reined in insurance company abuses before 2014. We never saw the practical or policy promise of the Democratic class of 2008, and the party will suffer for its inability to make a palpable difference for its constituencies despite the margins it had in the House and Senate.

What she said.