The first title is a personal favorite of mine–Greg Mitchell’s The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor and the Birth of Media Politics. It recounts the landmark 1934 campaign by checking in with a wide range of public figures–Sinclair, FDR, Hearst, Huey Long, Chaplin, L.B. Mayer, Herbert Hoover, H.L. Mencken, Ty Cobb, etc.–on a day-by-day basis, starting with Sinclair’s nomination and ending with the general election. Amazing.

Greg’s claim is that this race’s impact far outstripped its statewide significance. In fact, the techniques brought to bear on this race revolutionized the use of mass media in U.S. politics.

Earlier this year I attended an event at the Swiss consulate in San Francisco and chatted with a member of the Swiss parliament in town to discuss direct democracy. He was also an academic, and I mentioned that I was trying to reissue a book about Upton Sinclair. “Mitchell?” he asked hopefully.

Greg is making lots of appearances to discuss the book, including segments on GRITtv and NPR’s “On the Media” this weekend.

We’re selling the book from our website; the print book is available now and the e-book is scheduled for Monday.

Check it out, I say.

Fair enough, but as Connelly observes, it’s pretty good support for Markos Moulitsas’s argument in American Taliban. “The freedoms the [Islamic] jihadists hate,” Markos notes, “are the very same freedoms that our homegrown regressive ideologues hate: freedom of thought, of inquiry, of lifestyle.”

Markos will be at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle tonight at 7 p.m.

Markos has received a ton of support for his effort, but I thought it might be helpful to consider the liberal aversion to polemic as such.

In the comments section of Time.com’s “Swampland,” a blog about politics and policy, many of the haters went straight for the McCarthy-era labels. (News flash: The Cold War ended two decades ago.) Another quoted Ann Coulter (!) about the liberal tendency to name call. Classic.

But the Ann Coulter admirer was immediately challenged, and many comments responded to the first question, which wondered whether or not Markos’s title was “helpful.” Some of these comments included live links, video clips, etc. of right-wing vitriol with the tag line: “Was that helpful?”

This kind of exchange isn’t for everyone, but clearly “the politics of cool,” a kind of liberal specialty, doesn’t reach millions of Americans where they live.

Sarah’s book, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, has a great deal of material about Long, the leader of a 25,000-member megachurch in DeKalb County. According to the lead article on Comcast.com right now, Long has denied the charges.