A good point in an excellent piece called “Making markets in the political economy“:

I watched Howard Dean on The Daily Show last night, and rarely have I seen a major political figure so thoroughly, even painstakingly, inept at appealing to voters. His remarks elicited cheers from the true-blue supporters in the audience, but only at the expense of alienating every single other person in the country. If he wasn’t making ham-fisted attempts to prove Democratic moralistic superiority by selective and theologically shallow quotation from the bible—an activity that even bible-thumping Republican congressmen undertake with more caution (and erudition) than Mr Dean did—he was claiming that his was the party of real moral values. Cringe. When was the last time you heard an RNC chair say something like that? Answer: you don’t, because the “Family values” guys know that you do not garner votes by saying “Everyone who voted for the other guy is immoral” . . . especially when the other guy got a majority.