After Gonzales: Twilight for the Bush Presidency?

The resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales marks a significant turning point for the Bush administration.

For one thing, Gonzales' exit signals a witch hunt victory for hardline leftists and the Democratic Party (see Memeorandum's Monday blog round up here). In addition, the administration faces a remaining term on the defense, with little recent legislative momentum and an upcoming presidential election season likely to pull attention away from the White House.

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an analysis of the prospects for the Bush administration's remaining lame-duck agenda:

President Bush's loss of another close, longtime aide closes one particularly messy stage of his second term, but suggests a new one may be opening: the lame-duck phase.

That hardly means Mr. Bush is irrelevant, but it does suggest his means for exerting influence are going to be different -- and perhaps clumsier -- from hereon. Increasingly, it appears he will be preoccupied with three objectives: managing the Iraq war; using presidential vetoes to thwart Democratic plans and spending impulses; and advancing a Republican agenda as best he can through regulatory moves and executive actions that skirt congressional inputOver the past several months, the controversy over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his firing of eight U.S. attorneys has impeded parts of Mr. Bush's agenda, notably the effort to expand wiretaps of terror suspects. The attorney general chose to use Congress's August recess period to put a stop to such distractions by ending his embattled term.

Over the past several months, the controversy over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his firing of eight U.S. attorneys has impeded parts of Mr. Bush's agenda, notably the effort to expand wiretaps of terror suspects. The attorney general chose to use Congress's August recess period to put a stop to such distractions by ending his embattled term.

his August break, though, marks a broader turning point for the Bush presidency. Since Republicans lost control of Congress in last fall's elections, it has been an uphill struggle for Mr. Bush to move big items on his domestic agenda past an uncooperative legislature, or to shake the shadow of the war in Iraq. By his aides' own admission, those tasks will get even more difficult when Congress returns this fall.

Read the whole thing. The White House discounts the notion of declining influence in the remaining months of office:

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, rejected the notion that the administration is losing momentum. "The term 'lame duck' is for dime-store political scientists," he said. "It demonstrates a misunderstanding of the power of the presidency, and a miscalculation of the energy and intentions of this president."

He said the White House has an "aggressive" agenda that will address an overhaul of surveillance laws, the Iraq war, spending, education and free trade, and he pointed to solid support among Republicans in Congress for blocking bad legislation, if necessary through upholding vetoes.

Whether the term "lame duck" has much meaning or not, the administration is certainly a far cry from the early-2005, post-reelection era of robust political capital.

Yet, I do think that given the nature of Congress' slim Democratic majority, and the central role the Iraq war will play over the next 15 months, the president is in a good position to set the debate, thwart the Democrats' big spending agenda, and help position GOP candidates for victories at all levels in November 2008.

Public opinion polls show Congress sustaining less public support than the administration. With additional victories in Iraq (and a reasonably good assessment on the war's progress by General Petraeus in September), the Democrats will be desperate to portray the war as a failure, and Bush can hammer their liberal lawmaking agenda with the veto. The appearance of gridlock will consolidate a "do-nothing" image for the "Pelos-tinians" in Congress, and the administration can shift attention to international diplomacy, and can develop an agenda to rebuild America's moral capital in global politics.

New Congress is King of Oversight

Thomas Mann, Molly Reynolds, and Peter Hoey have an interesting article in today's New York Times on the 110th Congress' comparative legislative productivity. Here's the introduction:

JUST before Congress adjourned for its August recess, Democrats engaged in a flurry of legislative activity, while Republicans complained about a “do-nothing” Congress’s meager policy accomplishments. Deep partisan differences, narrow majorities and a Republican in the White House have frustrated Democratic ambitions and fueled a toxic atmosphere in both chambers of Congress. The public’s low approval ratings reflect broad discontent with the direction of the country but also displeasure with Congress for failing to reverse course on Iraq and for continuing the bitter partisan warfare.

But has this really been a do-nothing Congress? The circumstances are similar to those in 1995, when a new Republican majority in both houses took office under a Democratic president. So perhaps the best question to ask is, how is this 110th Congress doing compared with the 104th Congress, in 1995?

The authors make the case that the new Democratic congressional majority has produced a more substantive legislative record than did the Republicans after 1994:

The new Congress has enacted a far-reaching lobbying and ethics reform bill, an increase in the minimum wage, recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, foreign investment rules and a competitiveness package, and has embedded a number of major initiatives and new priorities in continuing and supplemental spending bills. Democrats also made headway on energy, children’s health insurance, college student loans, Head Start, drug safety and a farm bill — though much of this awaits action in the Senate or in conference and faces a possible veto.

The tale of the tape is what I find interesting, however. Be sure to click here for the article's informative graphic, which includes a nice table of comparative statistics.

One of the biggest achievements of the new Congress is to ramp up the level of legislative oversight of the executive branch. While some have argued that Congress in recent years has been too deferential to the presidency (including Mann himself), the Democrats are probably less worried about the proper functioning of the separation of powers than they are about punishing Republicans for their ambitious, highly-partisan (even brazen) agenda of recent years.

Here's a nugget from the article:

Democratic promises to restore civility and regular parliamentary procedure by allowing the minority party a larger role in deliberations have foundered. The number of restrictive rules for debate has increased, and the conference process has been short-circuited on various occasions.

I've yet to see any sweeping legislative successes under the Democrats - for example, nothing as monumental as the Republican-led Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

Pelosi, Reid, and the Democrats appear in disarray over Iraq, and the administration's steadfast resolve on the war has kept the Republian Party's priorities at the top of the policy agenda.

Trojan Horse Pragmatism: Markos Moulitsas as Vanguard of the Revolution

Peter Beinart has a very interesting analysis of Markos Moulitsas and the netroots up at the New Republic.

Beinart notes that in dismissing the most left-wing candidates in recent presidential elections, Moulitsas is illustrating the netroots movement's political pragmatism, its willingness to coopt the Democratic Party as a mainstream institutional vehicle to advance its progressive cause.

What explains this? Mostly it's the historical marginalization of the radical protest fringe in mainstream electoral politics. Beinart provides an excellent historical review of the failure of new left and militant forces to bring about radical change. With the possibility of utopian revolution more distant, hard left forces today see opportunity in capturing the Democratic Party for their own left-wing fundamentalism.

Beinart summarizes this shift, arguing that the Daily Kos netroots represent the most viable radical movement in decades:

It's the first broad-based liberal movement to emerge since communism's demise. In the Progressive era, it was conventional wisdom on the American left--asserted by everyone from Eugene Debs to John Dewey--that socialism was historically inevitable. Then, during the Depression--until Stalin's alliance with Hitler and the news of his terrible crimes brought most leftists to their senses--the Soviet Union became a real-life model of what revolution, as opposed to mere reform, could achieve. Even in the '60s, the shift towards outright resistance coincided with an enthusiasm for revolutions abroad. In Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, the New Left saw blueprints for the revolution it desired at home. Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd visited Hanoi, and Stokely Carmichael moved to West Africa, where he took the name Kwame Toure in honor of the leaders who had brought independence to Ghana and Guinea. "For generations," writes Todd Gitlin in his excellent book The Sixties, "the American left has externalized good: we needed to tie our fates to someone, somewhere in the world, who was seizing the chances for a humane society."

Now that's impossible. Sean Penn can embrace Hugo Chávez and Michael Moore may swoon over Cuban health care, but such radical camaraderie pales in comparison even to that of the Reagan years, when every major campus boasted a branch of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which championed El Salvador's Marxist fmln. The Soviet Union is gone, and, virtually without exception, leftist revolutions in the third world have ended in tears. (Nelson Mandela, perhaps the only recent foreign leader to enjoy demigod status on the American left, underscores the point. Post-apartheid South Africa may be anti-American, but it is more capitalist than it was under white rule.) Even the social democracies of Western Europe don't shine as brightly as they did a few decades ago. With the cold war's end, there is simply no compelling ideological alternative beyond America's shores.

On the right, this has produced a utopian spasm: a belief that communism's demise proves capitalism's perfection, vindicating its purest, most deregulated form. But, on the left, it has made revolutionary rhetoric sound absurd. The netroots feel the American system has gone fundamentally wrong; that, in some profound ways, it has become less just, less decent, less free. And yet, the American system is all they have. It can be reformed, turned into a better version of itself. But it can't be overthrown because there is nothing with which to replace it. Markos Moulitsas is an idealist in a post-utopian age.

Beinart's analysis can be taken a step further, however. Perhaps we might see Kos in the light of Marxism-Leninism. Kos's netroots movement is analogous to Lenin's vanguard of the proletariat.

Moulitsas himself - not unlike Lenin - demonstrates a tremendous level of confidence in his political skills, and the rightness of his cause. This outlook allows him to dismiss centrists, such as Joe Leiberman, as outside the true constituency of the Democratic Party. In his recent writings and appearances, Moulitsas has evinced what I consider elements of megalomania. He's got an essentially irrational faith in the power of his movement, and his trumpeting of fake successes nicely illustrates delusions of grandeur.

Yet, in the event of Democratic Party successes next year, Moulitsas will claim the party's victories resulted from the efforts of the netroots and the appeal of its ideology. Kos will claim he and his acolytes alone possess the true progressive insights and credentials to achieve a long-lasting hard left agenda in the American political system. Rather than staying with the party's mainstream, electable functionaries, Kos will use his netroots hordes to purge party centrists, and they'll threaten to bludgeon the Democratic Party hierchy if it deviates from the netroots' Leninist line. A reign of democratic centralism will follow.

Kos' pragmatic political project is an ideological Trojan Horse. His pragmatism seeks to commandeer the official Democratic Party establishment to bring his movement to power and usher in a socialist revolution from below. As improbable as that might sound, Kos - in his drunken stupor of perceived power - certainly sees promise in the netroots's ideological role of as vanguard of the revolution.

Debating Sanctuary Cities

Kimberly Strassel's Friday Wall Street Journal essays are among my current favorites in mainstream press commentary. Her article this week is a disappointment, however.

Like the newspaper for which she writes, Strassel leans toward open borders advocacy. In her piece, she's critical of the debate erupting between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giulilani over illegal alien sanctuary cities, and she argues that the Republican Party risks alienating Hispanic voters, perhaps for decades:

A vocal Republican minority is demanding tough talk on an issue that has inflamed its passions for most of this year. Who are these two front-runners to refuse? Immigration gives them an easy way to talk up their security credentials, while simultaneously keeping the conversation away from thornier questions about social issues, or Mormonism, or unsupportive children. It also allows them to distinguish themselves from that dastardly immigration reformer, John McCain.

Unfortunately for their party, what neither man can do is keep the rest of America from listening. And for every base Republican who is gratified by talk of ID cards and border patrols, there's an entire family of Hispanic immigrants who are absorbing the mean language of "sanctuary cities," "lawbreakers" and "deportation." Many of these folks are religious, entrepreneurial, and true believers in the American dream; as such, they're the biggest new voting potential the Republican Party has seen in ages. But a growing number, just like those Catholics of yore, are angered by the recent rhetoric and wondering why they should pull a lever for any party that would go out of its way to tag their community as the source of America's problems.

I've written here many times that the great strength of the United States is our assimilationist culture and robust diversity. Yet, for the life of me I cannot understand how analysts can dismiss people's legitimate unhappiness with the breakdown of law and order on the issue of immigration.

Out of pragmatism, I supported the comprehensive immigration reform bill moving through Congress earlier this year. That support put me at odds with most partisans in the GOP base. But the idea of sanctuary cities goes against our reputation as a nation of laws, and I think it's an issue that just makes people mad. Strassel's wrong about this one: The sanctuary controversy is a debate the GOP presidential hopefuls want to raise.

John Edwards and American Foreign Policy

Out of the four articles published so far in Foreign Affairs' Campaign 2008 series, John Edwards' is the least impressive. Edwards wants to make clear that the American war in Iraq was a mistake. He argues that the Bush administration's foreign policy is the worst in generations:

At the dawn of a new century and on the brink of a new presidency, the United States today needs to reclaim the moral high ground that defined our foreign policy for much of the last century.

We must move beyond the wreckage created by one of the greatest strategic failures in U.S. history: the war in Iraq. Rather than alienating the rest of the world through assertions of infallibility and demands of obedience, as the current administration has done, U.S. foreign policy must be driven by a strategy of reengagement. We must reengage with our history of courage, liberty, and generosity. We must reengage with our tradition of moral leadership on issues ranging from the killings in Darfur to global poverty and climate change. We must reengage with our allies on critical security issues, including terrorism, the Middle East, and nuclear proliferation. With confidence and resolve, we must reengage with those who pose a security threat to us, from Iran to North Korea. And our government must reengage with the American people to restore our nation's reputation as a moral beacon to the world, tapping into our fundamental hope and optimism and calling on our citizens' commitment and courage to make this possible. We must lead the world by demonstrating the power of our ideals, not by stoking fear about those who do not share them.

I might be more inclined to take these arguments seriously had they been made by someone who was not in office when the war in Iraq was launched, or by one who had not voted to authorize the U.S. mission to liberate the Iraqi people from decades of authoritarianism.

It's certain that many mistakes were made in Iraq, but to argue that the war constitutes one our of greatest debacles ignores history and the strategic blunders that have been made in every war in which the U.S. has waged.

Edwards also argues for an immediate drawdown in Iraq, which is problematic, because the administration has rightly adjusted course and American forces have achieved great success in defeating the insurgency and establishing security in many regions of the country. Here's Edwards call to cut and run amid some of our greatest victories since March 2003:

We should begin our reengagement with the world by bringing an end to the Iraq war. Iraq's problems are deep and dangerous, but they cannot be solved by the U.S. military. For over a year, I have argued for an immediate withdrawal of 40,000 to 50,000 U.S. combat troops from Iraq, followed by an orderly and complete withdrawal of all combat troops. Once we are out of Iraq, the United States must retain sufficient forces in the region to prevent a genocide, a regional spillover of the civil war, or the establishment of an al Qaeda safe haven. We will most likely need to retain quick-reaction forces in Kuwait and a significant naval presence in the Persian Gulf. We will also need some security capabilities in Baghdad, inside the Green Zone, to protect the U.S. embassy and U.S. personnel. Finally, we will need a diplomatic offensive to engage the rest of the world -- including Middle Eastern nations and our allies in Europe -- in working to secure Iraq's future. All of these measures will finally allow us to close this terrible chapter and move on to the broader challenges of the new century.

Edwards in fact sounds reasonable in his proposals. Yet, he provides no discussion of the strategic stakes his policy would entail. Unlike the recent essays in this series by Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani, Edwards refuses to acknowledge that the United States is not the source of the world's terror. Despite his obligatory reference to September 11, 2001, Edwards offers no compelling case that he clearly understands the true dangers facing the world today in Islamist fundamentalism.

Read the whole thing. It is true that the U.S. must begin a process of restoring our historic reputation as the force for global goodness. Doing so, however, requires a recognition of the rightness of our cause today. It requires clearly identifying the essential nature of our adversary. And it requires us to make no apologies for taking on agressively the nihilist forces bent on our utter destruction. This John Edwards has not done.

See also my previous posts in the series:

"Mitt Romney and American Foreign Policy."

"Barack Obama and American Foriegn Policy."

"Rudoph Giuliani and American Foreign Policy."

Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens Dividing GOP

Ronald Brownstein's column this morning addresses the issue of illegal immigration "sanctuary cities." Mitt Romney, one of the GOP frontrunners for the 2008 presidential nomination, has denounced these sanctuaries, and his policy proposals have generated some controversy at the top tier of the Republican field:

Let's say the 7-year-old daughter of illegal immigrants working in a big American city wakes up this morning with a high fever and a rash.

Is it in that city's interest for the little girl to receive treatment at a local public clinic or hospital? Or is that community better off if the child's parents try to treat her at home because they fear a doctor will ask about their immigration status -- and report them to the federal government if they can't prove they are here legally?

Before you answer, recall that in the 1982 Plyler vs. Doe decision, the Supreme Court ruled that children of illegal immigrants have a constitutional right to public education. That means whether or not that child is examined to determine if her illness is contagious, she will soon be back in a classroom of other 7-year-olds -- many, in all likelihood, American citizens.

In most places, for most people, this would not be a hard call. Leaving aside any question of compassion toward the girl, the community's public health is clearly served if she is treated before she infects anyone else.

Likewise, most people would agree that communities are safer if illegal immigrants who have been the victims of crime, or possess evidence that can help solve a crime, can talk to police officers without fear of being quizzed about their status. Or if illegal immigrants enroll their children in school (as the Supreme Court allowed), rather than keep them at home for fear admissions officials will investigate the parents' status.

These are the judgments that have prompted Los Angeles, New York and dozens of other major cities to adopt policies that in varying ways discourage municipal workers from assessing the immigration status of people using local services and sharing such information with federal immigration officials.

They also are the judgments that have provoked the sharpest clashes yet between the two leading GOP presidential contenders, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Romney charges that these city policies encourage illegal immigration by offering the undocumented "sanctuary." He proposes to cut off federal funds for cities that adopt them and calls New York's approach under Giuliani especially egregious. "New York City was the poster child for sanctuary cities," Romney insists. On Tuesday, he launched a radio ad condemning these city initiatives and, by implication, Giuliani.

Read the whole thing.

Apparently, when Giuliani was mayor of New York, the city adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the issue of cooperating with federal authorities investigating aliens under criminal suspicion, which included welfare fraud cases. City officials were allowed to provide information to federal officials, but they would not be able to make inquiries regarding the immigration status of city residents receiving public services.

How do we explain this? Is this just being practical?

The more I read about the down and dirty details of enforcing our immigration laws, the less confident I am that the country will ever get serious about securing our borders and respecting the rule of law.

Well, maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic: Federal officials did arrest and deport Elvira Arellano, the illegal immigrant who had evaded deportation for a year by seeking religious sanctuary at the United Methodist Church in Chicago. Not a day too soon, I might add.

More on the Daily Kos Syndrome

In a recent post I commented on the narcissism and megalomania of Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos. I'm not the only one who's noticed Kos' inclination toward self-aggrandizement.

Kimberly Strassel, in Friday's Wall Street Journal, offered an excellent analysis of the relationship between Kos radicals and moderate congressional Democrats. It turns out that Henry Cuellar, a moderate, free-trade Democrat in Texas, was attacked by Kos for his partisan "treason" in 2006. But Cuellar whethered the storm, and his story points to a lot of emptiness in Kos' chest-thumping:

A centrist Democrat who is pro-business, free-trade and strong on law enforcement, the congressman was designated an apostate by the left-wing Netroots crowd. They decamped to his district and bankrolled a liberal primary challenger. Mr. Cuellar triumphed, though Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas would later swagger on his blog: "So we didn't kill off Cuellar. But we gave him a whooping where none was expected and made him sweat."

Which is the point. If the liberal blogging phenomenon deserves to be known for anything, it is the strategy to intimidate or silence anyone who disagrees with its own out-of-the-mainstream views. That muzzling has been on full display in recent weeks as Mr. Moulitsas and fellow online speech police have launched a campaign against the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. DLC Chairman Harold Ford, Jr. was even thwacked last week for daring to speak to this editorial page (my sincere apologies, Mr. Ford)--the clear goal to discourage him from making such a free-speech mistake again.

Yet a lively midweek chat with Mr. Cuellar suggests that this campaign of threats isn't necessarily having the intended effect. If anything, it might be backfiring. "They win when they intimidate people," says Mr. Cuellar. "I've taken everything they've thrown, plus their kitchen sink, and I still stand proud as a moderate-conservative Democrat." He says his triumph over blogger fire has only strengthened his conviction that his party will only win elections if it continues to be a "big tent" open to all views. "To make that tent smaller, to force people--not to persuade, but to force, because these are threats--to quiet down, that's destructive in the long term and the short term."

Apparently, the netroots hordes spent hundreds of thousands dollars to unseat Cuellar in the primary, without success:

Despite all the blogger bravado that they now run the show, Mr. Cuellar's experience has been more the norm than the exception. The press may adore them, but the Netroots simply haven't notched many concrete victories. "Every time I see [Sen.] Joe Lieberman in the hall, we like to say 'we're still here, aren't we?'" says Mr. Cuellar, a spunky tone in his voice. California's Jane Harman, reviled as a "warmonger," last year whipped antiwar activist Marcy Winograd in a primary, 62%-38%. Ellen Tauscher, who heads the New Democrat Coalition in Congress, was savaged by left-wing blogs for her votes authorizing Iraq and free trade, and in particular for her warning to her party not to "go off the left cliff." She walked away from her re-election with 66% of the vote.

Mr. Cuellar goes so far as to argue that instead of cowing Democratic moderates, the left-wing attacks have united them. More middle-of-the-roaders now believe that if the bloggers were to win a high-profile primary, it would only energize them to go after others. "This has brought us together to say, 'this is us, and we've got to stick together,'" he says.

This is not to say that Kos is having no effect on moderates. Incumbents don't want to have to wiggle out from under from under Kos' thumb. That's understandable, but I think if Democratic members of Congress continue to stand firm against the netroots they'll save their party from obscurity.

Kos is much more blustery than knowledgeable about politics (be sure to read my dissection of his poor Washington Post essay in my earlier post). Strassel captures this in her essay's conclusion:

In a match-up on "Meet the Press" this past weekend, the Daily Kos's Mr. Moulitsas extolled those who use his site to trash thoughtful folks such as Mr. Cuellar as a shining example of "democracy." In the same breath he then commanded the DLC's Mr. Ford to "control" his moderate members, and force them to stop disagreeing with liberal Democrats. If you get that logic, you might just be a Daily Kos reader.

I watched that debate, which aired last Sunday. I think Ford was head-and-shoulders above Kos, particularly in his classiness. Ford might have been more agressive in going after a number of Kos' off-the-wall claims. In any event, argument isn't Kos' strong suit. Intimidation is. Ford could barely get a word in edgewise through most of the debate.

I don't like Kos. I'm going to keep the pressure on him on this blog.

The Leftist Tide in American Politics?

Is America turning left? The Economist wants to know:

FOR George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America's reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history, a man who sought to turn his victories of 2000 and 2004 into a Republican hegemony, may well end up driving the Western world's most impressive political machine off a cliff.
That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot's disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) and where the South and West have grown far more quickly than the liberal north-east, it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation.

Now they would settle for a lot less. Having recaptured Congress last year, the Democrats are on course to retake the presidency in 2008. Only one Republican, Rudy Giuliani, looks competitive in the polls, and his campaign is less slick than those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Voters now favour generic Democratic candidates over Republican ones by wide margins. Democrats are more trusted even on traditional conservative issues, such as national security, and they have opened up a wide gap among the young, among independents and among Latinos (see article).

The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism. Indeed, the failings of Mr Bush's coterie are oddly reassuring for some conservatives: once he has gone, they can regroup, as they did after his father was ousted in 1992.

Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to “save” the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in “big-government conservatism” is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress.

From this perspective, the worrying parallel for the right is not 1992 but the liberal overreach of the 1960s. By embracing leftish causes that were too extreme for the American mainstream—from unfettered abortion to affirmative action—the Democrats cast themselves into the political wilderness. Now the American people seem to be reacting to conservative over-reach by turning left. More want universal health insurance; more distrust force as a way to bring about peace; more like greenery; ever more dislike intolerance on social issues.

Read the whole thing (and also click on The Economist's supplemental analysis of trends in partisan identification).

Next year does look to be a Democratic year in terms of party dynamics. But I don't think we're heading toward a long-term realignment toward Democratic liberalism (some analysts even argue that the GOP retains the edge toward lasting party preeminance). But the final paragraph of The Economist's piece is intriguing:

One finding that stands out in the polls is that most Americans distrust government strongly. Forty years ago they turned against a leftish elite trying to boss them around; now they have had to endure a right-wing version. In democracies political revolutions usually become obvious only in retrospect. In 1968, with America stuck in another bruising war, few liberals saw Richard Nixon's southern strategy as part of a long-term turn to the right. All that was clear then was that most Americans urgently wanted a change of direction. That is also true today.

I think the main changes people want are two: success in Iraq and economic security. Until those two issue areas improve, Democratic prospects will remain bright.

The Daily Kos Syndrome

Susan Gardner and Markos Moulitsas published an exceptionally self-important commentary in yesterday's Washington Post. The piece is a great example of the Daily Kos Syndrome, which is the growing phenomenon in the Kos crowd for narcissism and megalomania.

Here, Gardner and Moulitsas argue that the hard left netroots now occupy the "center" of American politics. The Democratic Party - and its reactionary Democratic Leadership Council wing - has compromised with the evil forces of the American right, mounting attacks against the "centrist" blogosphere from the redoubts of Fox News!

Read some of the essay for yourself:

Three years ago things looked bleak for the Democratic Party. George Bush had just won a second term while his party consolidated its grip on Congress. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay crowed about a "permanent Republican majority," and Beltway Democrats acquiesced as Republicans built their unchallenged (and lawless) unitary executive.

Democrats appeared to be on the run, disorganized and demoralized. But outside of Washington there was hope. Grass-roots Democratic activists had seen the future of our politics in Howard Dean -- plain-spoken and unapologetic. His presidential candidacy had come up short, but its fresh, optimistic approach -- predicated on offering clear contrasts between the two parties -- was poised to redefine the party.

Dean was elected chairman of the Democratic Party despite predictions of electoral doom by the usual suspects in Washington, including the Democratic Leadership Council. In the House, Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi to lead them over current DLC Chairman Harold Ford, who warned of disaster if Pelosi won. Calling her a "throwback" who practiced a "destructive and obstructive" style of politics, Ford proclaimed, "I don't think Nancy Pelosi's kind of politics is what's needed right now." Today, Nancy Pelosi is the first female speaker of the House.

Ford, like his fellow Washington insiders, grossly misunderstood the American electorate. He and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley continue to do so [" Our Chance to Capture the Center," op-ed, Aug. 7]. Convinced that this is fundamentally a conservative nation, Ford demanded that Democrats unceasingly inch toward the right or risk electoral irrelevance. As then-DLC official Ed Kilgore put it in 2005, "If we put a gun to everybody's head in the country and make them pick sides, we're not likely to win." But we who live outside the D.C. bubble -- in all 50 states, in counties blue and red -- were hearing voices at odds with the Washington consensus. People wanted real choices at the ballot box. And given the disastrous rule of the Bush administration, they wanted a Democratic Party that stood tall and pushed back like a true opposition.

The new leadership responded. A concerted grass- and Net-roots effort, bridging online activists and the labor movement, forced Democratic officials to reject any "compromise" with right-wing interests seeking to gut Social Security. Democratic poll numbers rose in the wake of this victory as Bush's fell. Standing strong for a core Democratic program was not only good for our country, it was smart politics.

Months later we championed Ned Lamont's victorious primary challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. Beltway insiders predicted that our success would cost Democrats the U.S. Senate, and consultants allied with the DLC fretted that activists were "pushing the party to the left."

In fact, we pushed the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the "centrist" groups had been unable to accomplish for decades -- not even in the DLC's glory days of the 1990s.Read the rest of the piece.

I'd have to differ in my interpretation of these events.

Howard Dean? The biggest loser of the 2004 election season. His appointment to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee was a demotion as far as presidential aspirations are concerned. Perhaps his move to head the party was a concession to the left's netroots fundraising abilities, but Iowa voters showed that even a lot of money doesn't trump common sense analysis of the candidate and their credentials.

Harold Ford and Nancy Pelosi? Ford lost his Tennessee Senate race in 2006, but his move to the DLC appears to be a smart one, given the electoral record of DLC-backed candidates (Kimberly Strassel noted Friday that DLC-oriented candidates composed the vast majority of Democratic House seat pick-ups last November). Nancy Pelosi's certainly made history as the first woman House Speaker, but her legislative leadership record thus far doesn't appear to be one worth emulating. As Strassel notes:

Nancy Pelosi shrewdly presented her party as more centrist in last year's election, yet upon winning tossed the gavel to her liberal wing. Egged on by activists, Congressional Democrats have spent eight months fighting for surrender in Iraq, tanking trade pacts with Latin America and South Korea, and maneuvering to institute backdoor socialized health care.

Democratic poll numbers? Nancy Pelosi's negatives have been steadily rising since taking office in January. In comparison, the "unpopular" President Bush has seen his poll numbers improving, and he's currently just about tied with the Congress in the public's esteem, which is noteworthy, as the radical left constantly berates Bush as the "worst president in history."

Ned Lamont? His inability to win against Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut's general election is a powerful rebuttal to Kos's claims of netroots centrism.

The Democrats were unable to win control of Congress for decades? That's a strange one? What decades? The Democrats held the majority in Congress until 1994! It is an achievement to take majority control in 1996, but it pays to get the history straight.

And what's all this about the DLC's glory days of the 1990s? Well, let's not forget Bill Clinton, the only two-term Democratic President since F.D.R. What'd he do? Move the party to the center, right? Isn't that what this tricky commentary piece is all about. Can't stand free trade and welfare reform right? No, that stuff's only for the evil right wing!

Moulitisas and his crowd are deluded - they're suffering from the DKS, the Daily Kos Syndrome. There are other manifestations of the disease worth noting, not the least of which is the Kos crowd's ugly tendency toward anti-Semitism. I'll look at some of those other DKS symptoms in later entries.

The Faded Centrism of the Democratic Party

Kimberly Strassel's got a great essay on the Democrats and the radical left in today's Wall Street Journal. Apparently, the hard left netroots base is critical of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist advocacy group co-founded by Al From in the pre-Bill Clinton era. From argues that 2008 represents perhaps the best political environment for the Democrats in years. To which Srassel notes:

That is, if his party doesn't blow it...The far left has found something to unify it - hatred of George W. Bush. Technology has given it the means to organize; what the right found in talk radio, liberals have found in the "netroots" Internet, from MoveOn.org to Daily Kos. Its activism has of late overshadowed groups like the DLC, which still believe in such creaky notions as ideas....

Markos Moulitsas, chief flogger-blogger on the Daily Kos, this week slammed the DLC as a group that wants to "blur distinctions with the GOP," and reveling that Democrats had won in 2006 because liberals like himself had "forced" Americans to pick sides.

Strassel says that the left's ultimate goal is to get the Democratic presidential candidates toeing their line, and the Kos crowd has been having some success:

At least a few activists danced a victory lap...a few weeks back when every last Democratic candidate spurned the DLC's annual convention in Nashville, instead turning up at Mr. Moulitsas's YearlyKos event in Chicago.

But I particularly like Strassel's argument regarding the radical left's influence on the new Democratic congressional majority:

Nancy Pelosi shrewdly presented her party as more centrist in last year's election, yet upon winning tossed the gavel to her liberal wing. Egged on by activists, Congressional Democrats have spent eight months fighting for surrender in Iraq, tanking trade pacts with Latin America and South Korea, and maneuvering to institute backdoor socialized health care. This undoubtedly has something to do with Congress's approval rating, which now stands below that of even President Bush.

Read the whole thing. Strassel begins and ends the piece with comments from Harold Ford - now the new DLC chairman, and peeved with the netroots - who notes that it was DLC-backed candidates in the 2006 elections who helped build a Democratic majority.

The hard left's narcissism blinds it to its failed record of helping the Democratic Party (for example, with brilliant attacks on centrists like Joseph Lieberman). Interesting too is that as news of the surge's progress continues to come in, the hard left forces of the Democratic Party will look even more wacky than they already are!