Will the Democratic Party hang its collective head shamefacedly over the performance of its Senate Judiciary Committee members during the Alito hearings? Senators Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin et al. were simultaneously repulsive and inept. Tom Smith’s critique is not one degree overheated:
In case you haven’t noticed, the Democratic Party has reduced itself to a pathetic and dysfunctional state. The best they can do is tell Bush to respect the privacy of people in the terrorist cell calling plan, and hurl around accusations of racist and homophobe the way only the most cretinous Birchers would throw around “communist.” I cannot help but think most Democrats would be embarrassed and ashamed by Kennedy’s and Schumer’s antics, if they bothered to inform themselves, and who can blame them for not doing so? Most people know intuitively that it is very wrong to impugn a person’s integrity and imply he harbors all sorts of morally disreputable motives on the basis of “evidence” the most feeble minded can see amounts to nothing. It’s offensive. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we are supposed to be so finely tuned that we can see why being “heteronormative” is offensive, but not see that calling a man financially dishonest, a bigot and a misogynist, on the off chance that some marginal political gain might be gotten out of it, is not just dandy? Is just politics? It is a risky business to underestimate the decency of the American people, and I really think the Democratic leadership has taken the wrong end of this bet.
Yes, they have. But they don’t read The Right Coast. Instead, they see news stories that unanimously characterize their solons’ interrogation of Alito as no worse than “spirited” and “aggressive” probing of the nominee’s “inconsistencies”. Not a word indicates that these guys looked more like second rate goons than pillars of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Assembly.
Nor will there be any media examination of the causes of this absurd performance, particularly the perceived need to cozy up to a party “base” that is increasingly irrational and extremist. No criticism (that is, no criticism from quarters they respect) will come the Senators’ way for parroting talking points from left-wing nuthouses and paying no attention to Judge Alito’s thorough, patient answers. All in all, the onslaught will go down in the perpetrators’ minds as a valiant, if unsuccessful, battle against the forces of darkness.
Hence, there will be no Democratic self-examination, just as there is no internal concern that Michael Moore and Daily Kos are not the ideal boon companions for a party that wants to appeal to mainstream America. Corollarily, Democratic leaders won’t restrain the gallop of the party’s left wing into the fever swamps.
From a conservative Republican point of view, there could be nothing better, yet it would all come to naught if the media were “fair and balanced”. The divergence between the dominant segment of the Democratic Party and mainstream American opinion is approaching Landon-like proportions. If the media covered what is happening, rather than playing down all radical connections, rank-and-file party members would (I’m pretty confident – I know plenty of thoughtful, liberal-but-sane Democrats) exert pressure for pulling back from the swamplands. But the information needed to spark that kind of protest remains obscured from everyone who gets his news from the TV networks and the elite press.
By way of contrast, the inadequacies of Congressional Republicans have been widely reported, stirring rebellion among the party masses and inspiring contenders for Majority Leader to pledge to put a stop to overspending and kanoodling with K Street lobbyists. Suppose, though, that the media were stridently pro-Republican. Then Tom DeLay’s lame insistence that all fat had been cut from the budget would have been trumpeted without contradiction. The “bridge to nowhere” would have garnered a few snooze-evoking paragraphs on page B7. Stories about Medicare Part D would ignore its complexities in favor of admiration for the “brilliant” political tactics behind its enactment. Whenever Jack Abramoff made the news (which would be much less often than he does in reality), there would be reminders that he directed a third of his and his clients’ political contributions to Democrats (rising to nearly half during the current election cycle) and that two of the five members of Congress under the most intense prosecutorial scrutiny are Democrats. There might also be more observations like this one from OpinionJournal Political Diary (which, I believe I’ve said before, costs only $3.95 a month):
“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”
In that alternative universe of conservative media bias, Republican legislators’ decline into comfortable incumbency would be a non-story – until the cumulative effects eventuated in an economic crisis or Canadian Liberal-sized scandal, succeeded by a decade in the wilderness. Happily, the reforming impulse hasn’t been stifled by friendly reporters. If Republicans do poorly this November, they already know why and are in the process of applying remedies, so that a bad 2006 is likely to prelude an excellent 2008. The Democrats, free of any such checks and balances, won’t be reformable until after palpable disaster strikes them.
Thank you, Dan Rather!
Update (1/13/06): As an example of rank-and-file pressure inspired by blessedly biased media coverage, we have an Instapundit-fueled” (with plenty of high-powered help) “Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers”, using the House Republican leadership contest as a hook to “call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process”. It’s impossible for an outsider to form a judgement on the merits of the candidates (whose success in office will depend on working with the insiders who elected them, not pleasing bloggers), but all three at least proclaim their allegiance to a reform agenda. That wouldn’t be the case if the media had been nice to the GOP for the past several years. (Mind you, I don’t think that it would be a bad thing if they were fair and balanced; my point is that their hostility has redeeming value for the Right.)
On the other side of the aisle, Howard Kurtz tries to pretend in today’s Washington Post that “a pretty spirited argument is taking place within the Democratic Party: not just the usual soul-searching about finding a winning message for 2008, but about the war and national security and the essence of what the party stands for”. As his evidence – an exchange between a New Republic editor and Markos “Screw ’em” Moulitsas – shows, the “debate” is one-sided, more personal than political, and all but invisible: not an uprising of the party faithful against extremism but a lonely plea by an evanescing faction, lightly brushed aside. “Screw ’em” jeers that TNR’s circulation is waning. But if an impartial press gave him half as much coverage as Pat Robertson, cyberspace would be filled with “Appeals from Center-Left Bloggers”, and Democratic leaders would have to accommodate anti-radical sentiment, not just the denizens of the ideological marshlands.
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