Choose Your Narrative

For six or more months now the political story line playing in the media has been the crumbling of the Democratic party and the newly resurgent and confident conservatives, embodied by the Tea Partiers. We've all accepted this story more or less and as a consequence in the run-up to the midterm elections the question being debated is only whether the Democrats will suffer a defeat like they did in 1994 or will it be worse?

There has been another version of events out there, needless to say, and only in the week or so has it started to appear in the mainstream. Rather than witnessing a conservative revival, we are actually watching the implosion of the Republican party as it eats its own young.

The recent Republican primaries in New York and Delaware were the events that put this narrative on the media radar screen, but the story has been out there ever since Rand Paul won his Republican primary in Kentucky, and Earl Grey Aficionado Angle won in Nevada. While all politics is indeed local, taken together this Republican primary season demonstrates that the party has been hijacked not simply by its very right wing - which is true - but by its genuinely lunatic fringe.

As a result, the Republican mayor of Reno, Nevada has announced that he will be supported Harry Reid; Charlie Crist is running as an Independent for Senate in Florida and has a good chance of winning; the right-wing vote for governor in Colorado is deeply divided now that former Congressman Tom Tancredo - a nut of the highest order - is running on the American Constitution Party ticket; and most recently Lisa Murkowski has announced her write-in campaign for Senate in Alaska, after she lost to a right-wing Tea Bagger in the primary.

All of which is good news for Democrats - or it ought to be. What confuses me is why Democrats seem so beaten and dispirited right now. And, more to the point, why the predictions are that they won't turn out to vote. President Obama has scored more major legislative victories in his first 18 months than all but a handful of presidents and we have our tails between our legs.

Republicans will always have the advantage of money, and of a party discipline that Leonid Brezhnev would have envied. But the opportunities right now not simply to retain control of the House and the Senate, and to strangle the Tea Party in its crib strike me as quite good.

So c'mon folks - the only way to ensure that my second narrative, the story of GOP self-destruction, prevails is we all energize and turn out the vote to repudiate the Tea Party.

Reid My Lips

I've just been hit up - again - for money from the Democratic Senate Campaign, or whatever it is they call themselves. This time the appeal came with a big picture of fat ol' Rush Limbaugh and told me how Rush was going to derail the Obama administration. It went on to tell me how important my contribution would be to get a 60 vote majority in the Senate in 2010.

I'm not giving a dime and not just because I want the Rush Limbaugh Follies to go on and on. Between Rush and Michael Steele the Wingnut Party just gets better and better. And after you've caught those acts, you can tune into the Bobby Jindal show! Too funny.

I'm not poney-ing up any money because right now the biggest obstacle to getting bills through the Senate is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I complained about Reid some weeks ago in a post here and nothing that has happened since has given me any more confidence. Indeed, Reid's failure to get the votes in order for the big omnibus spending bill - a virtual no brainer - suggests that I was too kind about the Senator from the great state of Nevada.

Let's be clear: 60 votes are necessary to close off a filibuster. To date, Senate Republicans have only hinted that they might, perhaps maybe filibuster certain bills or nominees. They have, in fact, initiated exactly zero filibusters. Yet those threats have been enough to put Reid in a tizzy and driven Democratic operatives to dream about a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

The solution to the filibuster - and I'm certainly not the first or only person to say this - is for Reid to call the bluff. Give the minority party, the party of flat-earthers and Limbaugh-lovers, the opportunity to stall the business of the nation even as the economy goes down the drain. Poll numbers don't go as low as the Republicans would sink.

If he forced an actual showdown, Reid might discover A) that he gets the few votes he needs from Republicans like Arlen Specter, Jim Bunning and Olympia Snow who are terrified about their re-election or B) that the Republican threat is simply empty noise. Like everything else about the Republicans at the moment.

So until Reid gets his Senate in order, I'm not giving him any money.

A Boy Doing a Man's Job?

72 hours into the Obama Administration and two things are already clear:

1) The remaining Congressional Republicans really are the true-believing, kool-aid drinking partisan zealots we thought they were. Their actions in this short legislative week suggest that they would burn the village rather than save it. Holding up cabinet nominees, rattling sabers about legislation that hasn't even arrived yet. These are ugly people who plan to play even uglier.

2) In the Senate, where because of byzantine rules the few can hold up the will of the many, Harry Reid is not up to the task of leading Obama's agenda past Mitch McConnell and the drooling dogs in his party.

I have never been particularly impressed with Reid. He deserves some credit for taking over the Democratic Senatorial leadership at a low-water mark. But since becoming Majority leader in 2007 he has struck me as not having much of a vision, nor the political skills to turn that vision into successful legislation. Even with a majority, Reid couldn't stop most of Bush's agenda, though at that point there was nothing to be gained in cooperating with the president.

Shortly after the November election, I thought I heard a rumor that someone else might run against him for Majority leader. Either that rumor was simply blogosphere vapor, or Democrats decided that a fight over Reid was not worth having. Whatever the case, the future of Obama's agenda now rests in the hands of Harry Reid.

Unless I'm missing something here, this does not fill me with confidence. Obama will have a long honeymoon period with the public and the press I suspect, but it is clear that all his bipartisan gesturing will amount to very little with Congressional Republicans for whom "bipartisanship" is even more anathema than "gay marriage" or "Darwinian evolution."

Which makes it even more urgent that those of us who helped put Obama in the White House now turn our energy to lobbying those Republicans who stand in the way of making this a better country.

Reid is no Lyndon Johnson, who bent the Senate to his will with astonishing effectiveness. But unless he can begin to channel his inner LBJ, this brand new day we all felt on Tuesday may cloud over very quickly.