| Psychologist and author Drew Westen (whose recent book was reviewed and discussed by Jim Himes at FDL a few weeks ago) has a great piece up at Huffington Post this weekend that gets to the heart of the frustration of so many Democrats at their 11% Congress. That even when they do the right things (and always when they don't), they go about doing them in exactly the wrong way:
...Last November, the electorate was angry but hopeful. When the Democratic Congress surrendered to the president in late May in an attempt to "support the troops before Memorial Day," however, they were surprised that the outrage had now turned on them. Within a week they found their performance rated unfavorably not only by Democrats but by the Independents who had swept them into power. That should have been a wake-up call that their strategic calculations were miscalculations, and that their attempt to craft a "middle ground" that would appeal to moderate Republicans in the Congress--and in the process make Democrats appear, as they had been for the last five years, like supplicants to their Republican colleagues, begging for crumbs and pleading for them to be reasonable--was not winning the middle in Middle America. After repeating the same strategy, punctuated by public hand ringing and protestations of impotence (justified in terms of rules about cloture and filibusters arcane to the average citizen), they find themselves today with an approval rating at 11 percent.
The conclusion they should have drawn is that you can't project fear and have people trust you on national security. When voters perceive a mismatch between what their leaders say and what they do, they pay attention to what they do. And right now, they aren't listening to Democrats' positions on national security, which are difficult to discern (because they vary by the day, depending on whether they are preaching compromise, confrontation, or helplessness in the face of Republican intransigence). They're watching their posture, which seems anything but courageous and upright. They remember well how Republicans bullied the Democrats for five straight years in Congress and cowed them into relinquishing their right to use the same filibuster Republicans now threaten to use at every turn, and they get the message: that Democrats are weak in the face of aggression, and can barely put their hands in front of their faces to block the blows from a minority in Congress and from a bully sitting in his bully pulpit at 29 percent in the polls.
Forget about the strategy behind approving the supplemental in the spring, the "Iraq Summer," magical September, and the MoveOn ad itself. The bolded sentence above (my emphasis) is the key to understanding how - in the midst of a failed war that will end up costing over One. Trillion. Dollars., with daily scandals over private contractors and militias and tales of ideological incompetence run amok, with our Constitution and world reputation and currency in tatters and the Liebermans of the world angling to trip us into another war in Iran, with our army and national guard broken and denied equal time at home from multiple deployments by those same Liebermans - the party which made all this happen can say "boo" and watch Democrats scurry to the corners despite massive majorities of public opinion being on their side.
The biggest political story of last week had nothing to do with the increasingly depressing votes in the Senate - where as Westen notes, Democrats have happily let Republicans abuse the same filibuster they so loudly and so often decried as undemocratic throughout their own "upperdown" period in the majority. The biggest story was this new Gallup poll, which clearly and amazingly spells it out: the "Democratic" congress is far more popular with Republicans than with Democrats.
In the face of this absolute collapse of support, I can't begin to explain the Democratic Congress' palpable fear, from refusing to enforce their subpoena power, to rubber-stamping Bush's FISA abuses, to allowing Republicans to continue to control the national debate. Perhaps, unrealistically buoyed by Election '08 poll numbers and the cash flowing into campaign coffers of the DSCC and DCCC, they think things are just fine.
But things aren't fine.
Half the party just voted to condemn a single act of free speech on the part of one of their allies, and all criticism of members of the military in general. Democrats had already lost their entire base - now they just told them to "fuck off" in no uncertain words. (Update: Actually, 97 Senators in total, including 46 Democrats and Bernie Sanders, voted to condemn MoveOn, if you count the 50 votes for the Boxer Amendment, which equated MoveOn's ad with the Swift Boat vets. Feingold was the only one to vote against both amendments.)
Meanwhile, Chris Murphy is still the only Congressman in CT to have signed on to the one strategy that might do a thing to end this war before January 2009.
It's the votes and strategies and speeches and amendments that people are reacting to intellectually. But it's the fear that people are reacting to emotionally. There's no point in standing up for someone who won't stand up for themselves. And Democrats and "moderate" Independents around the country are getting this message loud and clear, even if the D.C. insider class isn't. |
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