By Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, and Jim Kessler

Replying to this round of posts, we are reminded of Harry Truman's line: "The best letters I ever wrote were the ones I never sent."

Allow us to start with a clarification to our first round response - we did not reply to Ruy because his comments came in too late.

We found many of the points made by the respondents to be thoughtful and instructive. We found a lot to draw upon from both Winship and Whitehead; they agreed with some of our arguments while strongly disagreeing with others. More importantly, for our purposes, they each gave us some new tangents to explore. Whitehead, for example, pointed out some interesting economic numbers about single, prime-age adults that we will look into as we continue our work.

In all, we found much to agree with in the posts.

Despite our differences with our critics, we remain, well, optimistic -- about the internal debate within the Party as well as the long-term prospects for the American middle class and the Democratic Party.

KSK