From Newsweek:

Democrats, even liberal ones, will let Ford be whoever he wants to be, for one simple reason: he may deliver them the Senate. Two weeks before the midterm elections, the Democrats' fate lies not in the hands of the party's much-dissected antiwar left but with a handful of careful, calculating centrists like Ford. Just a few months ago, Republicans were heralding Ned Lamont's defeat of Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut's senatorial primary as the end of the Democratic Party, its surrender to the angry extreme. But spend a few minutes with Sen. Charles Schumer, the strategic mastermind behind the Democrats' effort to win back the Senate, and Lamont's name barely comes up. (For the record: Lamont is trailing Lieberman, who is running as an independent, by as much as 17 points in the latest polls.) Instead, Schumer is talking up the "common sense" candidates running in states like Tennessee, Missouri and Virginia--candidates who don't sound much like Democrats even when they're assaulting Republican opponents over the war.

For two years the Democratic political establishment has been unabashedly applying one litmus test to candidates: their ability to win. In the Senate, Schumer took flak from activist groups when he backed candidates like Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, who is anti abortion rights. In the House, Demo-cratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel corralled a group of Iraq and Afghanistan vets to run as "macho Democrats" against Republican incumbents. At Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee--well, who's even heard anything from Howard Dean? He's largely taken a back seat to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in making the Democrats' prime-time case. "The days of Democrats' having to check 28 boxes before they run are over," Schumer says. "We want to win."

Read the entire article here.

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