So, let me get this straight.

When the Republicans come into office with an administration headed by cold war retreads like Rumsfeld and Cheney, both veterans of the Nixon administration, they are lauded as "putting the grownups back in charge", even though they mostly advocate economic policies that didn't really work for Reagan, and their foreign policy seems based, for the moment, on trying to build up the decrepit regime into the kind of global threat that the Soviet Union no longer provides.

When the Democrats find themselves running elder statesmen like Lautenberg and Mondale, essentially advocating policies that did work for Clinton much more recently, their friends like Robert Kuttner say that's proof that they're out of ideas.

It's a liberal making the critique, so it must be perfectly sensible.