“Sure, the Republicans are terrible. But are the Democrats any better?”
This question is constantly asked by people both inside and outside the beltway. Whatever people might feel about the Republicans, the Democrats just don’t cut it. Such ambivalence extends well beyond political independents to include most partisan Democrats as well. To most outside observers, Democrats are weak and divided, timid and unprincipled, and intellectually bankrupt compared with the Republicans. It’s a theme reinforced by most political reporting, by the pundits, and by much of the liberal blogosphere.
How valid a view is this? Not very, suggests Amy Sullivan in a widely-praised piece in the Washington Monthly journal. There are certainly kinks in the armor, but there is much to praise in the current Democratic Party, which has been a far more effective opposition party than is given credit. Concludes Sullivan,
In 2002 and 2003, Joshua Micah Marshall wrote a series of articles for this magazine about the myth of Republican competence. In one of those pieces, he referenced Thomas Kuhn's famous paradigm theory, which maintains that people can hold fast to a theory or narrative even as vast amounts of contradictory evidence piles up. At the time, there were plenty of indications pointing to GOP missteps and policy failures. But Republican message discipline, and a general awe of the Bush White House's corporate authority model, ruled the day. Everyone “knew” the Bush administration was a well-oiled machine. It took three more years, more than 2300 U.S. troops dead in Iraq, a botched relief effort for Hurricane Katrina victims, and the vice president shooting a guy in the face for the narrative to change. Yes, it is possible for conventional wisdom to be that wrong.
So it is that Democrats can be “hopelessly divided” while voting together 88 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly; just one percentage point lower than the vaunted lock-step Republican caucus. They can be “pathetically ineffective” while dealing a humiliating defeat to the president's biggest domestic policy effort. They can be deemed “weak” and “timid” while setting the terms of the debate for pulling troops out of Iraq.
It seems the only way this particular narrative is going to change is with a Democratic victory in November. “They'll have to pay attention to us if we win,” Slaughter told me. Taking back either house of Congress while battling the idea that they're a weak, ineffective party with no ideas won't be easy for Democrats. But stranger things have happened. Just ask Newt Gingrich.
I encourage readers to read the whole piece.
For those interested in somewhat more critical take, refer to Greg Anrig from TPM Café, whose post is responded to by Matt Yglesias here.
So what have Democrats been doing? Well, Russ Feingold has just announced his support for gay marriage:
“Gay and lesbian people in our country are fighting a mean-spirited movement to harm them and to discriminate against them,” Feingold, D-Wis., said in a telephone interview. “I stand with them against that movement, and I'm proud to stand with them.”
Feingold said he decided to express his support for gay marriage in response to a Wisconsin constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions, which will appear on the state ballot in November.
Feingold’s call for censure of the president for authorizing wiretaps without court warrants has just received support from John Edwards and John Kerry.
Speaking about John Kerry (remember him?) he has just made a call for a withdrawal from Iraq within a year in a piece in the New York Times, calling for “Two Deadlines and an Exit”:
As our generals have said, the war cannot be won militarily. It must be won politically. No American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi politicians refuse to resolve their ethnic and political differences.
So far, Iraqi leaders have responded only to deadlines - a deadline to transfer authority to a provisional government, and a deadline to hold three elections.
Now we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet.
Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military. If Iraqis aren't willing to build a unity government in the five months since the election, they're probably not willing to build one at all. The civil war will only get worse, and we will have no choice anyway but to leave.
If Iraq's leaders succeed in putting together a government, then we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end. Doing so will empower the new Iraqi leadership, put Iraqis in the position of running their own country and undermine support for the insurgency, which is fueled in large measure by the majority of Iraqis who want us to leave their country. Only troops essential to finishing the job of training Iraqi forces should remain.
Kerry spoke of his position on Meet the Press this morning (transcript).
Sen. Barack Obama has recently announced a very reasonable package for increasing our energy independence. Obama also sharply criticized the President’s half-hearted energy package:
… after the President’s last State of the Union, when he told us that America was addicted to oil, there was a brief moment of hope that he’d finally do something on energy.
I was among the hopeful. But then I saw the plan.
His funding for renewable fuels is at the same level it was the day he took office. He refuses to call for even a modest increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars. And his latest budget funds less then half of the energy bill he himself signed into law - leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in under-funded energy proposals.
This is not a serious effort. Saying that America is addicted to oil without following a real plan for energy independence is like admitting alcoholism and then skipping out on the 12-step program. It’s not enough to identify the challenge – we have to meet it.
What to make of all this? To be fair, there is quite a bit Democrats can do better. The party still needs to find a real unifying theme for the 2006 campaign. Democrats in red-state races need to be more forthright about what they believe and the party still has a ways to go on national security and on Iraq. While it’s difficult to imagine that Democrats could have defeated the nominations of Sam Alito or John Roberts, the opposition to them (Alito especially) was incoherent and divided.
But for all the party’s faults, knee-jerk dissatisfaction with Democrats and is inaccurate and self-defeating. I'll leave it to Sam Rosenfeld in the TAPPED to put it simply:
Amy is very right here. Much of her focus is on the mainstream media narratives that continue to portray Democrats as invariably weak, divided, and feckless. But MSM cluelessness is an old story -- what's frankly more troubling and frustrating is the unyielding scorn and hostility that Democratic activists and netroots folks heap on the Democratic congressional leadership.
Take the question of caucus discipline. The lack of comparative context underlying liberal critics' incessant carping on this front is glaring -- compared to both recent and much more longstanding historical precedent, the current Democratic opposition has not only been disciplined and unified, but effective. Improvements can always be made, but it's simple ignorance to portray the state of the congressional caucuses under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as indistinguishable from what we saw under Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt in the early Bush years or, for that matter, what we saw from Democrats during the 1990s, when first Democratic congressional majorities confirmed Clarence Thomas and completely flubbed a major opportunity for universal healthcare legislation, then later Democratic congressional minorities joined ranks with Republicans on any number of illiberal, corporate-friendly initiatives. The current Democratic caucus is more ideologically unified, more disciplined in their votes, and on most scores more liberal than it has been in recent history.
Democrats don’t need to fall into an uncritical, Republican-style cult-worship, but we hardly need to be ultra-critical or overlook the real achievements of the Democratic caucus.
