It's amazing that TNR is actually so clueless as to write this line in its lede this week:

Where it once looked like Bill Clinton and Al Gore had helped purge the party of the lame identity politics that had ruined Democratic candidates for a generation, discussions of race and gender have returned with a vengeance.

Not long ago, the deputy editor of a much better magazine observed the following, with ruthless seriousness:

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power. In short, you can't be a white guy voting for another white guy and still play the identity game.

And of course, TNR loves identity politics, as it's devolved into a biweekly mimeographed synagogue newsletter. Another issue, another fucking Kinky Friedman diarist about Obama and the Jews or the New York Times and the Muslims and Jesus fucking Christ it's like he wants to become Norman Podhoretz. But that's not identity politics, no way.