Why Progressive?

Because the "Liberal" term has been damaged. Face it.. the median IQ in the US is 98. That means that most people aren't terribly bright, and they don't base their self-identification on any evaluation of policy, but rather the socialy acceptable labels.

Greenwald links to a Mother Jones article that dispels the myth that the last election was some great conservative awakening.

The most widely accepted narrative to emerge from the 2010 midterm elections, in which Democrats took a "shellacking" and lost the most congressional seats since World War II, was this: Sick of liberal overreach, voters -- especially independents -- shifted their favor to the right, choosing Republican candidates in huge numbers.

Not so, according to a new exit poll by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The firm's findings, released Friday, show that voters weren't necessarily allying themselves with the GOP, but rather were voicing their disapproval with Washington as a whole, and especially with the federal government's inability to restart America's economic engine. To wit, voters polled gave equally poor favorability ratings to both parties as well as the tea party, the poll found.

What matters most to voters isn't political nit-picking or Washington drama but the economy, plain and simple. As pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House staffer, put it, "While this clearly was a blow...to the president and Democrats for failing to fix the economy, there's very little indication it was an affirmation of conservative ideology and agenda. In fact, we were rather surprised in many ways at the fact that the voters, in large numbers, are still looking for larger answers to an economy that's not working for them in a situation that they find for the country very worrisome."

That jobs-centric conclusion probably isn't so revelatory for most Americans. After all, outside the Beltway, where such political narratives thrive, is where most unemployed people live. But it's a welcome corrective here in Washington, where the conventional wisdom suggests a GOP revival supposedly spurred by voters' newfound embrace of the Republican Party's ideas, however scarce they may be.

The reason the Democrats lost the house is because they didn't do one simple thing.. implement what Obama campaigned on.

It's really weird how afraid the Democrats are of being Liberals. Most Americans are Liberals, even if they don't want to be called that.