For victorious Democrats, now comes the hard part
It’s one thing to lob bombs from the safety of minority status, it is quite another to lead. With Democrats sweeping the Republicans out of the House for the first time in 12 years, and probably picking up the Senate pending recounts in Montana and Virginia, what they just accomplished was the easy part. Now comes the hard part of leading the country out of the sorry morass in which it finds itself.
Let’s neither under- nor over-estimate the magnitude and meaning of Democratic victory last night.
The leader of the “under-estimate” crowd is the idiotic and disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who with a straight face told MSNBC last night that a Democratic victory in the House would make them nothing more than a “lame-duck majority;” whatever that means, it is infinitely better than being a minority which is what hopefully faces his party for the foreseeable future. I have also seen lots of bloggers, liberal ones especially, downplay the meaning of the election as having been limited to just a few corrupt officials, say it’s a “small step forward,” it wasn’t a landslide, and so on.
From whence comes this pessimism? Have we been out of power so long we are still too afraid to relish being in the majority, fearing that we might wake up any minute and find out it was just a dream?
When the Republicans ushered in their so-called Republican Revolution in 1994 with guns blazing, by what margin did they hold the House? The GOP led Democrats by 230 to 204, a margin that shrank in the intervening years and one that was won mostly by victories in the conservative South. How about now? Democrats picked up at least 27 seats last night without losing a single one (unheard of in modern memory even in 1994), many of them in the Northeast but also in all other areas of the country. That put the count at around 228 Democratic, 195 GOP, and 12 still undecided as of this morning. Pretty close to 1994 in reverse, huh? With that 230 to 204 margin the GOP, for better or for mostly worse, imposed a long period of Republican hegemony in Washington that didn’t end until last night. If that number was good enough for them, it’s good enough for Democrats.
On the other hand, let’s not over-state the case either. Democrats won more for being the anti-Bush than for the strength of their own vision, and nobody is claiming a revolution. I don’t see that as a bad thing. An old saw in politics is that when your enemy is self-destructing, you stand back and let it happen. Republicans were doing such a good job of imploding, and voters seemed so eager for a change, that there was no reason for Democrats to stick their necks out by proposing plans and visions that would subject them to hostile fire. Keeping mum on a specific agenda was therefore good politics.
Now the election is over, the Elephant is dead, and it’s time for Democrats to grapple with the reins of power. I do not envy them the huge mess they have been left with to fix: Iraq. North Korea. Iran. Global warming and accelerating environmental degradation. Corruption. An economy teetering on the edge of a nasty recession or worse caused by a flattening housing market, loss of confidence in the dollar, and massive federal debt and trade deficits. Oil addiction to hostile countries. Stagnant wages. Soaring healthcare costs. The imminent retirement of the baby boomers and the accompanying burdens on federal entitlement programs.
The problems are monumental, and the nation is looking to Democrats to start providing some answers. If they succeed, they will likely forge an enduring majority. If they do not, they will either return to minority status or exchange power every so often with Republicans. In a way the deck is stacked against them, since many of the problems that were created by Republicans will see their full fallout and consequences under Democrats’ watch, and they therefore stand to be unfairly punished in the future. But that’s the nature of politics, and Democrats will either cope or not.
As they struggle for answers, the more liberal leadership should not forget that they were brought to power on the backs of moderates and conservatives who wrested districts away from Republicans. The center-left forms the backbone of the new Democratic resurgence. These people, the Blue Dog Democrats and others like them, will have to answer to their constituencies again in the not-too-distant future, and you can bet these folks will push hard for the kind of centrist agenda that the DLC and Rahm Emmanuel espouse. This alignment towards the center is also good for the party because our gain of moderates (truly the heart of America) is Republicans’ losses of same, making them more than ever a minority party of extremists on the Right.
Democrats are off to a good start, promising in their first 100 hours to do things like raise the minimum wage and force pharmaceutical companies to compete and lower prices for the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They will not have much time to celebrate and measure the drapes before being called to account for their vision on how to fix the mess in Iraq.
They better be ready.
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