Our favorite books of 2007: by Ruth Conniff.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

It's time for the quadrennial brain-wracking among Democrats and progressives about where the party is headed, and whether winning this time trumps sticking to ideals. Matt Bai's The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics documents the tug-o'-war among groups that shape Democratic politics. Bai spends an awful lot of time among the very rich and the fairly rich. Most of the characters he profiles have little on the line, personally, when it comes to the traditional Democratic issues of economic justice and racial equality (though he does have an inspiring description of a MoveOn house party in a working class, African American section of Washington, D.C., hosted, oddly, by Chris Rock's mother-in-law).

The dearth of a big, compelling idea, or liberal "argument," as Bai puts it, results largely from his subjects' privileged perch. These are not movement people but elites--whether political amateurs or professionals--who want to figure out how to tap movement energy. Markos Moulitsas Zniga, of DailyKos, dreams of vast wealth and power. Bai documents Jerome Armstrong's compromising boosterism for his paying client, Mark Warner, during Warner's...