Michael Hirsh, writing for MSNBC has some self-help pep talk for the Democrats. You'd think they wouldn't need it, Bush being about as popular as a moldy sour cream at the back of the refrigerator. Well, that's Hirsh's point.
A good therapist, we know, can sometimes help a person who’s lost his confidence or mental balance. But what do you do when an entire party needs therapy?
You’d think the Republicans would be the ones in need of professional help. This is a party burdened with a president so unpopular he barely has a base to stand on—Bush seems to be bypassing the lame-duck stage and heading straight for dead duck—a Vietnam-scale quagmire in Iraq and a post-Katrina rot of incompetence and corruption that is infecting the very foundations of the presidency and the GOP’s control of Congress. Not surprisingly, the Republicans are at each others' throats over this loss of prestige and popularity. Neoconservatives and traditionalists are fighting bitterly over foreign policy. Moderates and conservatives are battling over immigration and deficits. And when the maverick John McCain declares his candidacy for 2008 sometime in the next year, the Republicans will be shrieking at each other in public over abortion and other social issues.
But at least the GOP is engaged in a war over real policy choices. It is an emotional debate, often a hysterical and ill-informed one, but it is a fight among adults who know what they believe in and who have the guts to battle for it. By contrast the Democrats, ostensibly the party poised to exploit this GOP civil war, don't seem to remember what it is like to behave as adults. They resemble nothing so much as ill-adjusted adolescents, afraid of their own shadows, much less the presidency. What are they afraid of? Themselves, essentially: their past, their own left, the populist rhetoric of their leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, Al Gore), the left-wing loony stigma represented by “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmmaker Michael Moore (every Dem’s favorite bugaboo). Above all they fear seeming and looking soft. They are all afflicted with varying degrees of megalophobia, a fear of assuming power. Even Dr. Melfi of “The Sopranos” wouldn’t take this case.
When a party has been out of power for a spell, there will always be a debate over whether the party has been too loyal to its basic principles, or now loyal enough. Hirsh, who claims to belong to neither party, urges the Democrats toward the former position. If only the Democrats were more bold!
But what if the problem lies deeper. Harry Truman once said that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. Maybe if you laid all the contents of the Democratic heart in piles, sorted according to issues, you be able to assemble a single policy. The Democrats think it deplorable that so many Americans lack health insurance. Fine. But does anyone really believe that we are about to institute Canadian style health care in America? Ask Hillary Clinton. And if not that, then what is the solution? If the party of the Ass has been working on that, its a big secret.
The closest thing to policy that the Democrats have been capable of generating for the last several decades is to preserve the achievements of the sixties and seventies. That's not a very forward looking perspective for a progressive party.
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