Let's hope the Democrats aren't the wimps in power they were out of power

1. Democrats, Don't Wimp Out -- by Paul Waldman/TomPaine.com

All over Washington, the sage barons of the establishment media are warning Democrats not to get cocky. Don’t move too fast, they say. Don’t push a bunch of wacky, left-wing ideas. Seek compromise, give ground, hew to the center, for only there lies the greatest prize of all: the praise of David Broder and Joe Klein, the nodding approval of the Washington Post editorial page, the admiration the Beltway cognoscenti reserve for those who know their place and know whose rings they should be kissing.

Bull. What Democrats need to do is spend the next two years crushing their opponents like bugs. It’s not about mercy, it’s not about manners, it’s about three fundamental goals: limiting the damage the Bush administration can do, passing whatever legislation they can in the short term to help the American public and laying the foundation for future progressive victories.

Democrats finally have the upper hand, and now’s the time to use it. Here are a few things they can do to get started.

1. Investigate—But Smartly

The combination of the most secretive administration in modern times and the most supine Congress in memory meant that Congressional oversight utterly disappeared over the last six years. Democrats have an obligation—to the people that elected them, and to democracy itself—to make up for lost time. Investigations should be rolled out on a carefully planned schedule, to maximize both news coverage and pressure on the administration.

But that doesn’t mean they should simply investigate anything and everything for no purpose other than laying siege to the White House. As the Boston Globe reported last November, when Bill Clinton was president the Republicans took 140 hours of sworn testimony on the pressing issue of whether the administration had mined the White House Christmas card list for potential donors. Yet they took only 12 hours of testimony on the Abu Ghraib scandal. “The government reform panel alone,” they wrote, “issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.”

Democrats could distinguish themselves from the excesses and omissions of their predecessors by focusing on one new investigation to be started each month. Iraq, corruption and the administration’s unwillingness to abide by the Constitution are the three areas that most cry out for oversight—and it wouldn’t hurt to add an investigation of Republican dirty tricks during this past election (Rick Perlstein has a good rundown of the horrors that went on here .) Goodness knows, it won’t be hard to come up with 24 things to investigate between now and the 2008 election. Which leads us to…

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Pick Fights

The White House will resist any effort to subpoena documents and testimony on the matters Democrats want to investigate. So Democrats should let them. Let them proclaim that they are above the law. Let them initiate a constitutional crisis. Let them take it all the way the Supreme Court. The resulting controversy will help Americans understand the deep anti-democratic strain that rushes through the arteries of this administration like a virus.

And Democrats should find every opportunity they can to embarrass Republicans by forcing them into uncomfortable votes. On the first item on the Democrats’ agenda—raising the minimum wage—it looks as though President Bush is going to do what he often does when backed into a corner: surrender, then claim victory. Democrats should welcome his capitulation, but make sure to characterize it as such. Thanks for finally giving millions of hard-working Americans a break, Mr. President, but it’s too bad it took you six years and a thumping at the polls to be forced into it.

The prospects for another of their agenda items, enabling the federal government to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs under Medicare, look far tougher. But Democrats should wage the fight anyway. Two outcomes are equally likely: Either they won’t be able to pass such a bill in both houses, or they’ll pass a bill and Bush will veto it. Either way, it shows whose side they’re on, and whose side the Republicans are on.

Bush also said he wanted to reintroduce his plan to partially privatize Social Security. The defeat he suffered the first time around on this issue was one of the key events leading to the Democrats’ victory. It showed them that when they stay united and make a stand on fundamental progressive values, they win. It also showed them that they could ignore the pleas of the “sensible” centrist talking heads scolding them for not having a “plan” of their own. So they should dare Bush to try again. “Let’s talk about your Social Security privatization plan, Mr. President. Bring it on.”

3. Boycott Fox

The Fox News Channel has been a reliable megaphone for White House talking points, a veritable RNC house organ proclaiming that Republicans are noble public servants and Democrats are whiny hippies who, if not engaged in an actual conspiracy with al-Qaida, are certainly serving the ends of America’s enemies. It has also functioned as a safe haven for Republicans to run to when things look bad. Shoot a guy in the face, and you can do your first interview with Brit Hume, secure in the knowledge that he won’t ask any tough questions.

So Democrats should say the following to Fox: You want to spread GOP propaganda all day? Be our guest. After all, it’s a free country. But don’t expect any Democratic newsmakers to legitimize you with their presence. We’ll go on every other network, be interviewed by every legitimate news organization. But we don’t consider ourselves under any obligation to pretend that buffoons like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson are news professionals who deserve a moment of our time. We’re not going to try to fight you; we’ll just act like you don’t exist.

This can be a lesson to the rest of the media—not a threat, but an indication that they need to change the way they think about Democrats. For years, journalists have looked on Republicans as tough, smart and skilled—in short, winners. Democrats, in turn, were viewed as wimpy, stupid and weak—losers. If Democrats want the media to treat them like winners, they should start acting accordingly. Stop worrying about getting reporters to like you, and start thinking about getting them to respect you. And if the David Broders of the world start complaining that you aren’t playing nice, that’ll be evidence that you’re doing something right.

4. Attack Conservatism

After President Reagan left office, a group of his supporters formed the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, whose goal was to get something—a school, a bridge, a building—named after Reagan in every county in every state in America. Their goal was not just to honor a man they revered but to elevate Reaganism. If Reagan can become the name on every public works project, he moves out of the realm of contestation to achieve the kind of status accorded to figures like Kennedy and Roosevelt. We don’t argue about whether Kennedy was a good president, we just accept it.

Democrats should do the same thing in reverse to the current president. The Bush Legacy Project should seek to make George W. Bush an albatross that can be strung around the neck of every Republican for many elections to come. They should continue to write books about how awful his presidency was, to heap ridicule on him, to make his name synonymous with incompetence and stupidity and corruption.

The message is this: When George W. Bush was president, conservatism failed and conservatism was rejected. Apart from “small government,” conservatives enacted much of what they had been clamoring for for years. They slashed taxes on the wealthy. They ballooned defense spending. They got their war on Iraq. They ignored or cut back regulations on the environment and workers’ rights. And what happened? The American people recoiled in disgust.

Democrats need to understand that they are engaged in a war of ideas, one that stretches far beyond any one Congress or presidency. In order to not just win today’s victory but to make tomorrow’s more likely, they have to continually discredit the other side’s ideology. The fact is that conservative governance failed, not because of a run of bad luck or a few bad apples, but because it is deficient at its core.

Democrats can and should use the excesses of the Republicans they defeated as bludgeons against them. Katrina. Terri Schiaivo. Jack Abramoff. Mark Foley. George W. Bush. These names should be strung around Republicans’ necks as often as possible, so Americans don’t forget why they voted Democratic in the first place.

Democrats should wake up every day thinking, “How can we keep Republicans on the run?” Never give them a moment’s rest, never let them advance their agenda, keep them on the defensive so they have to apologize for being the standard-bearers of a discredited ideology and a disgraced president. Do that, and every legislative battle and election to come will be that much more likely to swing in your favor.

(Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success)


2. When It's Democratic -- by Ted Rall

Live every day as if it were your last. It's good advice. Modified for politicians: Treat every term in office as if it were your last.

Republicans get political existentialism. When they campaign for office, they promise to be uniters, not dividers. Once they win an election, however, talk of bipartisanship promptly sails out the window. They freeze out the Democrats, elected representatives and constituents alike. Rather than compromise to accommodate the millions who voted against them, Republicans play to their right-wing base: racists and Christianists. The GOP belligerently promotes the most extremist items on its legislative wish list by declaring their victory to be a broad manifesto for radical change and wholesale rejection of the other side. They nominate judges whose conservatism is far to the right of the average Republican. Sure, they want to unite the country--by forcing everyone to go along with what they want.

"Back in December 2000," recalls Lincoln Chafee, a Republican senator from Rhode Island, "after one of the closest elections in our nation's history, Vice President-elect Dick Cheney was the guest at a weekly lunch meeting of a small group of centrist Republicans." Many people expected Bush, who'd received 48 percent of the vote and had been anointed after a controversial Supreme Court decision to halt the recount, to make good on his campaign promises to reach out to Democrats in a spirit of bipartisanship. But Cheney had something else in mind. "I was startled to hear the vice president dismiss suggestions of compromise and instead emphasize an aggressively partisan agenda that included significant tax cuts, the abandonment of international agreements and a muscular, unilateral policy."

Cheney and Bush understood that they might only have one four-year term to accomplish their goals. Knowing that they might never get another chance, they insulated themselves with a staff of likeminded ideologues and got to work at remaking America in their image. Drawing on bluster and hubris, they bullied Democrats into going along with the transfer of the federal tax burden from the rich to the middle class. Next they skillfully exploited Americans' fear and anger following the September 11 th attacks to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2004 they had eliminated civil liberties that citizens of Western countries had enjoyed for hundreds of years, emasculating Congress and the Courts to create a "unified executive" form of government.

Most of the changes carried out by Bush's neoconservatives during his first term--new tax rates, USA-Patriot Act, two wars, pulling out of the Geneva Conventions, torture, domestic eavesdropping--will probably remain in force for decades. Their strategy of running roughshod over the Democrats worked.

It helps to enjoy the complicity of the media. Whenever Republicans win an election, mainstream pundits cite the results as prima facie proof that the American people have handed them a mandate to do whatever they want.

When Reagan won in 1980, Newsweek hailed his triumph as "an idea whose time had come," "a rousing vote of confidence in him and his politics," and posited that the results spelled "nearly certain death for liberal causes." When Republicans picked up seats in the 1994 midterm elections, House Speaker Newt Gingrich drew upon media support to stampede Clinton into a year-long "copresidency," resulting in welfare reform and free-trade pacts.

When is a win not a win? When it's Democratic. When a majority of Americans cast votes for the Dems, the results are invariably interpreted by the media as a public desire for moderation and bipartisanship rather than some "radical left-wing agenda." Democrats are told to abandon their campaign promises and ignore their liberal base. The pain and divisiveness of the (Republican-ruled) past must be healed by big-hearted (and soft-headed) Democrats. Democrats don't get mandates.

The double standard isn't new. "For all the records it broke," Time editorialized in 1996, "[Bill Clinton's 49-to-41 percent win] was a victory for studied modesty; for a willingness to swallow his pride to preserve his power, embrace his enemies to steal their ideas and march into history as the first two-term Democrat since F.D.R., not with great leaps forward but one baby step at a time. It couldn't be clearer if they had spelled it out letter for letter: voters elected a moderate Democratic President to carry out a moderate Republican agenda."

Clearly.

For the first time since 1994, Democrats find themselves in control of both houses of Congress. They picked up 28 seats in the House and six in the Senate--a stunning sweep considering that congressional redistricting has made it more difficult to unseat incumbents. But the facts that a lot more Americans voted Democratic than Republican and that Bush's approval rating has hit a record low (31 percent) don't mean much to the official media--or, it seems, to the winning Democratic candidates.

Time 's post-election cover story was called "Why the Center is the Place to Be." The incoming freshmen representatives, reported The New York Times (house organ of the Clinton-style centrist Democrats) in its lead story on November 12, "say they were given a rare opportunity by voters, many of them independents and Republicans, who were tired of the partisanship and gridlock in Washington."

"Now, they say, they have to produce...to find a bipartisan consensus...to avoid the ideological wars that have so dominated Congress in recent years, to be pragmatists, and to change the tone in Washington after a sharply partisan campaign."

"They've set a bad example in not working with us," incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said of the Republicans. "We're not following that example."

Blech. The fools are already running for reelection.

The New New Democrats need to study the calendar. Two years from now, they may well end up back in the minority, reading passionate speeches no one will ever hear to an empty chamber for the benefit of C-SPAN. Rather than triangulate or moderate their views, Democrats should take that two-year time limit seriously and go gangbusters, emulating Cheney and Bush's balls-to-the-wall style to pass as much legislation as they can before 2008. That means unraveling as many GOP accomplishments as possible. Cancel the tax cuts, close the torture camps, restore habeas corpus , get the NSA out of our email, yank our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's high time for vengeance. Impeachment is essential, to cleanse our national soul, as a downpayment of good will toward the rest of the world, and because they did it to Clinton for far, far less. And we need investigations--lots of them. Special prosecutors ought to track down everyone, up to and including Bush, who lied about WMDs in Iraq, chose not to pursue Osama in Pakistan after 9/11, deliberately withheld help that could have saved lives during the Hurricane Katrina, and signed off on warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. Law and order starts at the top.

At the same time, Dems ought to ram through such long overdue (and popular) liberal agenda items as national health insurance, pulling out of the failed NAFTA accord and a big hike in the minimum wage. If any Republicans object, do what they'd do: call them terrorists or traitors or some other smear that forces them to sit down, shut up, and vote yes.

Of course, there's an alternative. Bill Clinton wasted his entire political career placing short-term victory at the polls over achieving his political goals. Sucking up to moderates and Republicans got him eight years in the White House, but for what? He never signed a major bill that could be described as liberal.

If they govern like there's no tomorrow, Democratic lawmakers will be able to say that they represented their constituents, who will have gotten what they voted for. That's how democracy is supposed to work. Remember?

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book " Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East ?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)


3. The (Fictional) Triumph of the Conservative Democrats -- by Thomas F. Schaller/NY Times

Two narratives have begun to emerge from the 2006 Congressional elections. The first is that Democrats didn’t win so much as Republicans lost. The second is that the Republicans who lost were beaten by a bunch of conservative Democrats.

There’s some truth to the first one: The election was a negative referendum on President Bush and the Republican Congress, specifically their mismanagement of Iraq, their ethical problems, and their inability to balance the federal budget or refrain from trying to distract Americans public with noisy wedge issues rather than provide solutions to more pressing problems.

But the second narrative is a fiction. And it is puzzling that Republicans and conservatives are the ones peddling it.

The poster boy for the Democrats-won-as-conservatives theme is Heath Shuler, a 34-year-old former University of Tennessee football star from western North Carolina. Just hours after the results came in last Tuesday, The Times’s David Brooks wrote in this space: “Many moderate Republicans survived, despite my pessimistic expectations … Furthermore, many moderate Democrats won, like Heath Shuler in North Carolina.” Charles Krauthammer echoed the point in his Washington Post column on Friday: “Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats . . .Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax — and now a Democratic House member.”

But take a closer look at who actually won — and lost — last Tuesday.

As of this writing (a few recounts are pending), Democrats captured 6 Senate seats and 28 House seats, and they are also expected to unseat Republican Representative Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

Based on the National Journal’s ideological ratings of Congress, the majority of defeated House Republicans were purged from the liberal third of the G.O.P. caucus. Ten of the 28 most liberal Republicans lost, including four of the top 12: Jim Leach of Iowa (No. 1), Nancy Johnson of Connecticut (No. 3), Simmons (No. 7), and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire (No. 12). Sherwood Boehlert of New York, sixth on the list of most liberal Republicans, is retiring from Congress, and the Democratic candidate won the race for his seat.

As for the new class of Congressional Democrats, sure, it includes a few self-described “pro-lifers” and opponents of gun control. But the vast majority of House candidates in competitive races ran as Iraq war critics who support reproductive choice and embryonic stem cell research, want to raise the minimum wage, and oppose privatizing Social Security. A pack of blue-dog Zell Millers this is not.

The Senate results are similar. Much attention has been paid to the flattop haircut and heartland personality of farmer Jon Tester, Montana’s Senator-elect; the way former Reagan Navy secretary and Vietnam veteran Jim Webb used his son’s combat boots to kick out Virginia’s George Allen; and the anti-choice position of Bob Casey, the newly elected Catholic Democrat from Pennsylvania.

These biographical nuggets obscure the fact that these men and the other three new Democratic senators ran as strong economic populists and thundering critics of the war. Republican Conrad Burns of Montana closed the gap during the late stages of his campaign by criticizing Tester as a big-government tax-and-spender. Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse beat the most liberal Republican incumbent senator, Lincoln Chafee, by running to his left. And in Ohio, Republican moderate Mike DeWine fell to Sherrod Brown, who promptly was named heir to the late Paul Wellstone, the über-progressive senator from Minnesota.

What we witnessed last week was the final stage of a regional realignment, one that began four decades ago, in the wake of the civil rights movement, and slowly but steadily converted most southern Dixiecrats into Republicans. Until this year that transformation was incomplete, as many Ford- and Rockefeller-style Republicans continued to represent blue districts or blue states in the Northeast and Midwest.

The Rust Belt realignment of 2006 provided a corrective: Now (presuming Simmons is defeated), Chris Shays of Connecticut will be the sole surviving Republican among the 22 Representatives from New England. Although Maine and New Hampshire each have two Republican senators, should any of them or retire, Democrats will be poised to take their places.

The great irony of the 2006 midterms for Republicans is that the conservatives who pulled the party to the right survived, while the liberal wing was decimated. Because the Democrats who beat those liberal Republicans ran even further left, the notion that conservative Democrats carried the day is plainly absurd.

Conservative talking heads usually rush to paint Democrats as a pack of tin-eared, out-of-the-mainstream liberals. That’s why it’s so surprising that some of these same voices are now cherry-picking the results in an effort to perpetuate the fiction that Republicans lost, but conservatives somehow won. It suggests that this year’s defeat so stunned the conservative movement, it lost its messaging mojo, too.

For liberal Democrats, that may be the biggest victory of all.

(Thomas F. Schaller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the author of “ Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South”)


4. THUMP — by Hendrik Hertzberg/New Yorker

Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass destruction. “The postwar process hasn’t gone as well as some had hoped,” the reporter ventured. “Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?” The President’s reply—as iconically Bushian as “Bring ’em on”—came to mind last Tuesday night as the big blue waves started rolling in. “Well,” he said back then, “we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election.”

Actually, it was more like an impunity moment. “Let me put it to you this way,” Bush had said the day after John Kerry’s concession. “I earned capital in the campaign—political capital—and now I intend to spend it.” And spend it he did. Whatever he had left over after he blew a wad trying to turn Social Security into a bonanza for the financial-services industry was squandered on an unending skein of assurances that the war in Iraq was going fine. By last week, the coffers were empty, and not even the hurried-up sentencing of Saddam Hussein to be hanged by the neck until dead could refill them. The accountability moment had arrived at last.

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters—actual people—are a truer measure of the swing’s magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

This election was a crushing rebuke to Bush and his party. The rest is interpretation. Nearly everyone agreed that public anger about the Iraq catastrophe was paramount. To the surprise of much of the political class, exit polls suggested that corruption was almost as formidable a factor, especially among Independents and disaffected Republicans. On the right, some commentators complained that the G.O.P.’s problem was that it hadn’t been conservative enough: too much spending, too much nation-building, too much foot-dragging on abortion and the like. Others took comfort in the hypothesis that, because a number of Tuesday’s new faces are Democrats of a (relatively) conservative stripe, the election was actually a victory for the ideology, if not the party, of George W. Bush. In a blog post titled “All’s Well on the Conservative Front,” Lawrence Kudlow, of National Review , pointed to the “conservative Blue Dog Dems who won a whole bunch of seats” as proof that “Republicans may have lost—but the conservative ascendancy is still alive and well.”

Maybe. Or maybe those Blue Dogs won’t hunt. In truth, the great majority of Capitol Hill’s new Democrats will be what used to be called liberals, and in every case Tuesday’s Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them. Moreover, the fate of ballot initiatives around the country suggests that, on balance, the conservative tide may be ebbing. In six states, mostly out West, proposals to raise the minimum wage won easily. Yes, seven ballot measures banning same-sex marriage passed, albeit by smaller margins than has been the pattern; but one, in Arizona, was defeated—the first time that has happened anywhere. Missourians voted to support embryonic-stem-cell research. Californians and Oregonians rejected proposals to require parental notification for young women seeking abortions, and the voters of South Dakota overturned a law, passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor eight months ago, that forbade abortion, including in cases of rape or incest, except when absolutely necessary to save the mother’s life. Rick Santorum, the Senate’s most energetic social conservative, went down to overwhelming defeat—man on dog won’t hunt, either, apparently.

A more persuasive analysis than the all’s-well theory holds that Tuesday’s debacle reveals the limitations of the “mobilize the base” strategy, which Karl Rove devised on behalf of his boss, and which has required the Republican Party to entrust itself entirely to a hard core of taxophobes, Christianists, and dittoheads. Rove’s strategy, this analysis suggests, seemed to work only in 2000 (when Bush came in second at the ballot box) and in 2002 and 2004 (when its weaknesses were masked by fear of terrorism). Traditionally, America’s two big political parties have been loose coalitions, one center-left and one center-right. Rove transformed the Republicans into something resembling a European-style parliamentary party of the right, politically disciplined and ideologically uniform. This year, in response, many on the center-right acted like Europeans, too: they voted not the man (or woman) but the party (Democratic). That sealed the fate of Rhode Island’s popular senator Lincoln Chafee, among other remnants of moderate Republicanism. For the center part of the center-right, there was nowhere to go except to the center part of the center-left.

The day after the election, at a press conference in the East Room of the White House, the curtain rose on Act III of “Oedipus Bush.” On one level, the current President Bush was all crisp decisiveness as he announced the replacement of his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, with Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director and the president of Texas A. & M. University. Below the surface, but only a little below, something altogether more unsettling was going on. Rumsfeld was one of the first President Bush’s least favorite people; Gates is one of his most trusted confidants. He is also an active member of the Iraq Study Group, which is headed by another of the father’s intimates, James Baker. The group’s report, expected in the New Year, will offer the outlines of a different course in Iraq—an offer the President may be unable to refuse. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld yields to Gates; in the Oval Office, adolescent rebellion gives way to sullen acquiescence.

Bush said some of the right things at his press conference, but he chose his words carelessly. He congratulated the “Democrat leaders” and promised bipartisanship—a goal he is unlikely to advance by referring to his hoped-for new partners by a name calculated solely to annoy them. Impressions are inherently subjective, of course; but he looked like a man who at that moment would much prefer to be commissioner of baseball, the job he longed for in 1993, before falling back on running for governor of Texas. It has been obvious for some time that, as President of the United States, George W. Bush is in very far over his head. He does not know how to use power wisely. He will now have a Democratic Congress to restrain him, and, perhaps, to protect him—and us—from his unfettered impulses. This may not be the Thanksgiving he was looking forward to, but the rest of us have reason to be grateful.