Jeff Cooper (the law one, not the gun one) has a great post at Cooped Up, setting out the political audience and opportunity waiting for someone to wake up and seize it.

Participants in the new economy, Judis and Teixeira write, tend to be fiscally moderate but socially tolerant, believers in capitalism but also in the need for government to act as a fair referee to curb capitalism’s excesses, supporters of political reform. And, Judis and Teixeira posit, as America increasingly moves to a postindustrial economy, these voters will become more numerous. They will not alone be sufficient to form a majority of voters, but they will represent an increasingly important portion of any majority coalition.
The Bush administration is in no position to benefit from the posited shift. From the large tax cuts for the richest Americans, to the refusal to do anything about American corporations relocating offshore to avoid tax liability, to the weak corporate governance reforms, to the massive giveaways in the farm bill and the energy bill, the Bush administration, at least in its domestic policy, is dedicated principally to the proposition that government of the cronies, by the cronies, and for the cronies shall not perish from this earth. Its basic outlook is therefore antithetical to the emerging center-left voters that Judis and Teixeira believe they have identified.

And he identifies the problem that the current Democrats will face:

Much of the blame must be laid at the feet of the Democratic Leadership Council, which in recent years has devolved from a useful counterweight to other factions within the party into a pure tool for business interests and the wealthy. Thanks to the influence of the DLC, Tom Daschle has refused to allow a straight vote on requiring stock options to be treated identically on tax returns (where many corporations treat them as expenses) and financial reports (where most do not treat options as expenses). Thanks to the influence of the DLC, the Democratic leadership refuses to call for repeal of the large prospective tax cuts enacted last year, cuts that redound almost exclusively to the benefit of the very wealthy. Thanks to the influence of the DLC, a number of Democrats support the egregious bankruptcy bill that, in a time of economic slowdown, would greatly favor the large banks that bombard consumers with solicitations for cards carrying usurious interest rates. And thanks to the influence of the DLC and the Democrats’ ties to the entertainment industry, Democrats are supporting dramatic expansions of copyright law that would significantly complicate the creation, dissemination, and use of content for all but the big media players. These actions on behalf of the powerful over the people, combined with the failure to articulate and advance a coherent agenda in the one branch of the federal government in which they exercise control, means that Democrats, especially Senate Democrats, are ill-suited to seize the opportunity that, according to Judis and Teixeira, presently exists.

I could not have said it better, there’s lots more, go take a look right now…