Mark Warner Equates “Super-left” “MoveOn Crowd” and “Tea Party Crowd”

According to Mark Warner:

…there are a lot of folks I think on both sides, but the question will be will the super-left on my party – the MoveOn crowd in my party – and the Tea Party crowd on the other party, you know, they don’t compromise, so you know, I for one am…you know, there were too many times I bit my lip in the first year, or bit my tongue…I’m done…

I know that Mark Warner likes playing the “radical centrist” (no clue what it means, never defined, but you get the idea) and placing himself in the square middle between the “extremes” on the right and the left, but I’m not sure his equating of MoveOn and the Tea Party will go over too well among the Democratic “base.” It will be very interesting to see the reaction, if any, to these comments.

UPDATE: Another example of Warner’s anti-liberal rhetoric is on the “flip.”

UPDATE #2: MoveOn hits back:

Democrats just lost an election where much of the base didn’t turn out, and voters felt like Democrats weren’t on their side,” responded MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben in a statement to The Huffington Post. “Senator Warner’s response is to falsely equate 5 million MoveOn members, including over 102,000 in Virginia — people from all walks of life who worked tirelessly for Democrats in Virginia and all across the country — with the racist and xenophobic far-right wing of the Republican Party. If Mark Warner’s recipe for victory is to attack the core of supporters still willing to back Democrats, and to promise more deals with corporate Republicans, anyone who cares about progress should look elsewhere for leadership.”

Remember this?

And third is, I would say to some of our more liberal Democrats in the room, there is an acknowledgment that you can’t have this purist approach. That this is not going to be totally solved by some airy dream of it’s just gonna be all solar and wind, that nuclear has to be a piece of this, that coal has to be a piece of this, that there’s gonna be a portfolio approach. And I think those three factors make the possibilities of some action on this area on a national basis much higher than it was, say, six months ago.