As a classic illustration of how liberals so often seem drawn to the rituals of political hari-kari, consider the comments of one Martha Slade, an Oregon artist, who declared in the press yesterday that Barack Obama has flunked her purity test, thus rendering him totally unacceptable: "I'm disgusted with him. I can't even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this 'audacity of hope' stuff, it's blah, blah, blah. For all the independents he's going to gain, he's going to lose a lot of progressives."

The liberal blogosphere has been crying betrayal in the wake of Obama's gravitation to the center - his vote for the compromise eavesdropping law, which protects the telecoms from lawsuits; his support for the death penalty; his aversion to gun control; his stated desire to "refine" his antiwar stance - and no doubt there will be debate later this week, at the liberal Netroots Nation conference in Austin, over whether liberals should walk away from the guy, or, at best, hold their noses while pulling the Democratic lever in November.

But this kind of attitude is one big reason why Democrats tend to come up short in presidential elections. This is one big reason why liberals so often are losers.

This happened in 2000, when Al Gore was judged in some liberal quarters to be insufficiently pure (and that was indeed true, he did have a lot of ties to the corporate sector, among other perceived infractions); as a result, a pivotal number of purists gravitated to Ralph Nader, and the result of the past eight years speak for themselves. Just last Friday, for example, President Bush's regime decreed that it would not seek to develop any rules to curb global warming, or even to weigh the idea - in direct defiance of a Supreme Court ruling issued 15 months ago. It's fair to suggest that a President Gore would have reacted differently to that ruling.

The liberal loser mentality was also apparent back in 1980, when President Jimmy carter was judged to be insufficiently liberal (true again); as a result, liberals in search of the true faith gravitated to Senator Ted Kennedy, who tried to get Carter dumped at his own convention. Result: a liberal flameout, the spectacle of the governing party torn asunder on national TV, and a Ronald Reagan landslide in November.

Memo to the purists, especially those who are clueless about American history: A Democratic nominee always tries to move to the center. It is a precurser for success.

John F. Kennedy did it in 1960, to the point of moving to Richard Nixon's right, by claiming (falsely) that we were suffering from a "missile gap" in our competition with the Soviet Union. Liberal Democrats were not happy about that - their hearts were still with Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser in 1952 and 1956 - but they suppressed their qualms long enough to secure the narrow victory.

And let us recall Bill Clinton. Flawed though he was, as both candidate and president, there's a big reason why he was the only two-term Democrat since FDR. He staked out centrist positions, even at the risk of ticking off the liberal base. Indeed, liberals spent much of the '90s fuming to each other, and to journalists such as myself. I heard it all many times: Clinton was too conservative, he signed the bill that ended six decades of federal welfare guarantees, he didn't right hard enough for reforms that would help labor fight the union-busting corporations, he did squat to narrow the income gap between rich and poor.

But, in the end, the liberals played ball. As labor activist Don Sweitzer told me in 1996, during Clinton's second national convention, "Fighting over purity (in the past) wound up costing us the whole bushel of apples."

Perhaps, with Clinton, liberals only got two-thirds of a loaf. I'd be curious to know what ratio they could realistically expect to get from John McCain.

Messiahs don't win presidential elections. Smart politicians do. One noteworthy blogger, Denver criminal attorney Jeralyn Merritt, wrote this weekend that disgruntled Obama acolytes should quit "star gazing" and simply "recognize that a Democratic president is preferable to a Republican." Her implicit challenge to the purists is a self-evident no-brainer:

Do you want to win, or not?

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A great moment in the hall of mirrors:

On Meet the Press yesterday, John McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina - the ex-Hewlett Packard CEO who, for some reason, has been billed by the McCain camp as a drawing card for female voters - sought to spin away the damaging remarks uttered last week by chief McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm. As you may recall, Gramm the international investment banker had stated publicly that Americans are whiners, that they are suffering a "mental recession," and that the housing and gasoline crises are mere figments of their imagination.

Anyway, when asked about this Fiorina sought to shrug off the controversy by saying, "I think most Americans are not really focused on what a bunch of surrogates are saying."

Uh, well...if that's the case, then why did the McCain camp bother to put this surrogate on national TV to knock down the Gramm remarks?

Indeed, the McCain camp had better hope that nobody pays attention to Fiorina. Because there's something a tad amiss about seeing McCain and Gramm defended on the economy by a fired CEO who presided over massive layoffs and landed safely with a golden parachute worth $42 million.