We don’t know whether Dems are going to do well in just nine days, but let’s say, just for the sake of discussion, that Dems do well enough to reclaim the majority in at least one chamber.
With nearly all of the political establishment, on both sides of the aisle now expecting this to happen, Republicans have already begun trying to put Dems on the defensive about, well, acting like the Republican majority. If Dems had a congressional majority, the GOP says, they might occasionally hold oversight hearings. If Dems had subpoena power, Republicans warn, they might ask some inconvenient questions of the Bush administration. If Dems had real power in Congress, their conservative critics shriek, they might treat their political rivals nearly as badly as congressional Republicans have over the last 12 years.
To a certain extent, Dems are already on the defensive. Several party leaders have already promised to take impeachment off the table, for example. Others are subtly promising that they’ll “play nice” — concentrating on policy goals, not political payback and contentious investigations.
With this in mind, Paul Krugman had some advice for the party earlier this week.
Now that the Democrats are strongly favored to capture at least one house of Congress, they’re getting a lot of unsolicited advice, with many people urging them to walk and talk softly if they win.
I hope the Democrats don’t follow this advice — because it’s bad for their party and, more important, bad for the country. In the long run, it’s even bad for the cause of bipartisanship.
There are those who say that a confrontational stance will backfire politically on the Democrats. These are by and large the same people who told Democrats that attacking the Bush administration over Iraq would backfire in the midterm elections. Enough said.
Is it?
The notion that Dems would become the all-investigation, all-the time party is already being derided by conservative leaders, and Dems seem wary of the label. But as far as Krugman is concerned, Dems’ niceties are not only irrelevant, they’re probably counterproductive.
Why … should the Democrats hold back? Because, we’re told, the country needs less divisiveness. And I, too, would like to see a return to kinder, gentler politics. But that’s not something Democrats can achieve with a group hug and a chorus of “Kumbaya.”
The reason we have so much bitter partisanship these days is that that’s the way the radicals who have taken over the Republican Party want it. People like Grover Norquist, who once declared that “bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” push for a hard-right economic agenda; people like Karl Rove make that agenda politically feasible, even though it’s against the interests of most voters, by fostering polarization, using religion and national security as wedge issues.
As long as polarization is integral to the G.O.P.’s strategy, Democrats can’t do much, if anything, to narrow the partisan divide.
Even if they try to act in a bipartisan fashion, their opponents will find a way to divide the nation — which is what happened to the great surge of national unity after 9/11…. The truth is that we won’t get a return to bipartisanship until or unless the G.O.P. decides that polarization doesn’t work as a political strategy. The last great era of bipartisanship began after the 1948 election, when Republicans, shocked by Harry Truman’s victory, decided to stop trying to undo the New Deal. And that example suggests that the best thing the Democrats can do, not just for their party and their country, but for the cause of bipartisanship, is what Truman did: stand up strongly for their principles.
What do you guys think of this argument? If Dems are as aggressive in the role of the majority party as Republicans have been the last 12 years, does that lead to an endless cycle of recriminations and bitterness? Or will that happen anyway because of a far-right dominated party that prefers destruction to governing?
Maybe 2007 should be a year of reaching across the aisle, with Dems showing themselves to the more mature, reasonable grown-ups in Washington. Or, maybe, as Digby put it, “Letting bygones be bygones and simply blathering on about how we all need to put the unpleasantness behind us and get along will not win the respect of the American people nor will it fix the problems this nation faces.”
What do you think?
