Thursday, June 16, 2005

Where are the Daniel Patrick Moynihans?

Forget about the 435-member House of Representatives, which has always resembled a rugby scrum. The U.S. Senate is supposed to be the home of statesmen with solomn demeanors, serious men weighed down by the responsibility of government. Where is the quiet dignity of a Moynihan, or a Bill Bradley, or even JFK? It’s been supplanted by Democrats who have been driven half-insane:

Sen. Dick Durbin refused to apologize Wednesday for comments he made on the Senate floor comparing the actions of American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulags and a ''mad regime'' like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's in Cambodia.
Now the Senate minority party is represented by Durbin, “Loser” Reid, that crazy coot Byrd, and wannabes Kerry and Clinton. The Wall Street Journal can’t find a voice of moderation among them: “The Doughnut Democrats Whatever happened to the party’s middle?”

Many conservatives have watched the left's hostile takeover of the Democratic Party with great joy. We don't share that enthusiasm. The country would benefit from two vibrant parties competing on innovative freedom-enhancing initiatives. The problem is that the Democrats are running on empty when it comes to policy ideas other than big government, and this lack of competition has had deleterious effects on Republican behavior, as witnessed by their lack of any spending discipline.

Howard Dean observed recently that he hopes to "galvanize the Democrats into being the party of individual freedom and personal responsibility." That's a wonderful idea--just the kind that would put the Democrats back on the road to national viability. But that leaves unanswered the question of how a party that opposes voluntary personal accounts for Social Security, school choice for parents, tax and welfare reform, free trade and limited government broadly defined can sell itself as the freedom and responsibility party.
Senate Democrats should take a hard look at this graph and consider whether an idea-free ideology and endless filibustering have any chance in reversing recent trends.

Extra - More on the left wing crackup by Mark at Decision08.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A stark, powerful graph. Though I'm no statistician, it looks like the Democrats lost seats under LBJ, picked them up under Nixon, lost them under Carter, picked them up under Reagan and Bush, somehow picked them up under Clinton, and somehow lost them under Bush Jr.

In other words, it sure looks as if the public elected its Senators as a countermeasure to whichever party held the White House for 30 years. In other words, the last couple of years are the anomaly. When everything's skewing 51/49, incremental shifts look big, and it only takes incremental margins to create those shifts.

It also helps the premise just a wee bit to start the graph from the Democrats' 1963 peak of 66 seats, as opposed to going way, way back... let's say 4 years more. As in the entire decade of the 1950s, when the Dems held colossal majorities of either 49-47 or 48-47 for four straight Congresses. Or four years before that, when the GOP held a 6-seat majority.

But today, everything's different. I mean, my God! The Democrats haven't sunk to such historic Senate depths since 2001. Or before that, 1987.

Of course, lengthening or shortening the timeframe would only undermine the "long, steady slide" angle, while bolstering the nutty premise: "political support wavers." And that's not nearly as sexy a blog topic.

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