January 20, 2010, 8:08 am
The Democrats’ Day After
Mark Wilson/Getty Images Democratic leaders after the Senate passed national health care legislation on Dec. 24. From left to right: Max Baucus, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Richard Durbin and Christopher Dodd.
We will be updating this discussion with additional commentary throughout the day. Read Glenn Greenwald, Theda Skocpol, Norman Ornstein and Julian Zelizer in the forum.
The finger-pointing over the loss of the Senate seat in Massachusetts raises a perennial question in American politics: why do the Democrats always seem to be in disarray even when they control the White House, the Senate and the House? Why are the Republicans so much better at checking the power of the majority? Is this difference a matter of political discipline or is it rooted in the ideologies of the parties?
Update | 10:10 a.m.
A Party in Denial
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, is a columnist at Salon.com and the author, most recently, of “Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.”
Reactions to Scott Brown’s victory are predictable and self-serving. Obama loyalists insist it was all about local issues and Coakley’s weaknesses. Right-wing Democrats blame the “left elements in the Party” — who have gotten virtually nothing they’ve wanted the entire year. And most everyone else interprets it as vindication of their pre-existing views.
Obama has failed on his vow to change the way Washington works and that is the party’s greatest liability.
Whatever else is true, last night’s result — along with earlier gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey, polling disasters for Democratic Congressional incumbents, and the bizarre resurgence of a party widely assumed to be dead only a year ago — conclusively proves that something has gone radically wrong for the Democratic Party. One has to be in serious denial not to acknowledge that their approach is not working.
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Some important factors — especially the collapsing economy and exploding unemployment which Obama inherited — were beyond their control. But an electorate that delivered smashing victories to the Democrats in two consecutive national elections — and which had such high hopes for the “change” Obama repeatedly vowed to usher in — is now turning on them. To insist that Obama and party leaders are blameless is to ensure the downward spiral continues.
The notion that Obama’s policies are too “liberal” for the country is simply absurd, given that these are exactly the policies on which he successfully campaigned. But the central pledge of the Obama candidacy, beyond any specific issues, was his vow to change the way Washington works. It is his failure to do that which has become the party’s greatest liability.
A candidate who railed against secret deals and lobbyist influence negotiated this health care plan in secrecy with industry lobbyists, got caught entering into secret deals with the pharmaceutical industry, agreed to abandon his commitment to drug re-importation and bulk price negotiations in order to please the pharmaceutical lobby, and cavalierly refused to abide by his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open.
Worse still, two of the most popular provisions — the public option and Medicare expansion — were jettisoned, leaving the insurance-industry-pleasing provisions as the bill’s dominant features.
When one adds to that the subservience of the administration’s top financial officials to Wall Street and the lack of programs designed to aid struggling Americans, the perception has arisen that Democrats are both guardians of the Washington status quo and loyal only to powerful interests. That has allowed the corporatist G.O.P. to masquerade as populists and monopolize populist anger.
One significant disadvantage burdening Democrats is that they must accommodate far more ideological diversity than Republicans. A party that has both Ben Nelson and Russ Feingold will be prone to in-fighting.
The choice now for the White House is whether to move even further to the right or whether they will finally focus on galvanizing their base. As it always does, Beltway conventional wisdom will insist that they do the former (which may include abandoning health care altogether), but a party that has an already demoralized base demoralizes them further at its peril.
The Democrats’ Learned Timidity
Theda Skocpol is a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, and the author of “Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government,” a book about the failed 1993-94 Clinton heath care overhaul.
Why can’t the Democrats manage to move things forward? Why are they allowing the filibuster to block things when the Republicans did not? Why do Republicans use the filibuster much more than the Democrats did when they were in the substantial minority?
The Democrats haven’t reformed Senate rules that block change because they too love the personal clout those practices give them.
There are no perfect answers. Part of the answer may be the learned timidity and ready-for-defeatism of Democrats, who have not shaped national political or economic narratives since the 1960s. They have forgotten how to make heartfelt arguments, how to play hardball, and are always expecting to cave or surrender. But that is not all of it, and here are a few other considerations:
– Republicans under Bush used 51-vote rules meant for budget items to push through tax cuts for the wealthy. Tax cuts fit these rules better than many aspects of, say, health care reform right now, because a lot of that is regulatory.
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And of course tax cuts are fun for politicians to do. Democrats will be able to use 51-vote rules only if they start breaking things into popular, obvious steps that tax the well-to-do and fund benefits for ordinary people. Democrats have to stop using regulations to do everything indirectly, and turn to policies with clear budgetary implications in order to make reconciliation usable. They ought to be able to do this, but will they?
– This brings us to the fact that Democrats have serious internal class divisions in their orientations, networks, and support bases. A lot of them talk to wealthy people all the time (raising checks for re-election) and want to do things for them. Hence, it was easy to get Democrats to do tax cuts. Republicans under Bush actually got a bunch of Democrats to vote for those cuts most times; and many of the rest of the Democrats would have refused to sustain filibusters to block Republican tax cuts under Bush. Even in the majority, Democrats still have many ties to business interests and quietly look for excuses to avoid doing things that offend them. Not being able to act without 60 votes is a ready excuse.
– Since Obama’s election, Republicans have been terrified/angry and they are enough of a regionally and ideologically concentrated rump group to work together. They launched the “just say no” strategy and used it to get through the period before Al Franken’s election was confirmed. Republican negativism played great in the media, slowed or blunted reforms in the Senate, and interacted with slow-paced Democratic tactics in Congress to protract health reform bargaining. The public became increasingly turned off and worried, especially since most Americans have never believed that you can insure everyone without paying higher taxes.
Bottom line is that, at a certain point, by late summer and early fall, delay and united opposition seemed to be paying off for Republicans, and that of course strengthened resolve to obstruct in the Senate. Even moderates got the message that they would be “primaried” if they crossed over. Now with a Coakley loss, media pundits, led by David Broder, will urge Mr. Obama to compromise and “reach out.” But Republicans, whatever they say, will be even more determined to obstruct, because it works for them electorally. Democrats will need minds and guts to figure this all out, but will they have them?
– Democrats are so regionally and ideologically diverse that they not only cannot sustain filibusters when in the minority, they have a hard time getting their act together in the majority, even the near super-majority. What is more, after Al Franken’s election, the media told us the Democrats had 60 Senate votes, and Republicans taunted them with that. But of course they never did. They had Lieberman, a one-man wrecking ball beholden to no party.
– Filibusters, finally, used to be costly forms of obstruction. But Senate customs since the 1970s or so have made them easy for the obstructionists — and equally easy, as well as hidden, are things like “individual holds” to prevent votes even when the overwhelming majority is in favor. The Senate is not built for modern governance — though it is perfectly suited to modern media campaigns to obstruct and destroy public action.
Democrats in the Senate, with White House backing, could be changing customs to make holds visible and filibusters costly (for example, if senators using holds were identified and holds were made temporary, and if filibusterers had to maintain 40 or more senators present on the floor at all times). But the Democratic Senate leaders don’t take these steps, because secretly many Democratic senators are prima donnas who love the personal clout these practices give them. The best time to have acted was back at the start, when President Obama was more popular. Now it will be harder.
– Democrats, in the end, are setting America and their party up to fail, by not figuring out how to move things with huge majorities short of 60 in the Senate. Why vote for them, people will say, if they cannot do anything anyway? Or worse, if they engage in unseemly bargains to buy individual Senators’ votes with measures against the public interest.
Good questions.
Some say we need a new “constitutional convention.” I completely disagree. The Senate is one of many federal features of U.S. government that spreads out influence across our vast and beautiful nation, and that is fine. It does not bother me that some rules are less than purely majoritarian, that South Carolina has two senators. But those senators should not be able to team up with only a two-fifths group to block all changes permanently. They should be able to slow things down for a few weeks, if they take clear responsibility, but anything more should be supremely costly to them in time and embarrassment.
Majority political parties have to use procedural maneuvers, invent new twists, tweak rules, and change customs with the times. Today’s Democrats are not doing that in the Senate for the public good, and Americans have the right to be dismayed with them. Republicans have always unabashedly done this sort of thing, when in the majority or the minority, to further their own partisan purposes.
The dirty secret is that modern post-1980 Republicans believe government is the problem, and they are determined to use government’s own rules to keep government from working for most Americans!
How Party Cultures Differ
Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our two major political parties have differences, and they are more than ideological (although they are more ideological now than at any time in our lifetimes). Some of the differences are cultural: Republicans in office tend to be more disciplined, more sensitive to internal ostracism, more willing to stick together.
When Democrats are in the minority, they like to cut deals, even with the other side.
That may be because of a minority mentality; even though Republicans have had a sizable slice of power in Washington over the past couple of decades, an era of 40 straight years (actually, 60 out of 64 years dating from 1930 to 1994) shut out of the House of Representatives, with nearly as dismal results in the Senate, left an imprint. Republicans feel embattled even when in power, and they tend to hunker down together.
To be sure, activist conservatives out in the field don’t show any impulse to hunker down with establishment leaders. Their threats, rarely idle, to take on apostates in primaries provide further reasons for moderate Republicans to join with their conservative colleagues even when their ideological impulses might take them into bipartisan land. And partly as a result of those threats, there are very few moderate Republican lawmakers left in Washington.
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Democrats are more naturally unruly, but also have more moderates in the House and Senate — with numbers that have been expanded in the past two elections as they have made inroads in otherwise Republican districts. But those Democrats do not often face credible primary challenges from activist liberals; there aren’t usually enough in their districts to make the difference.
Ron Edmonds/Associated Press Did Kennedy help the G.O.P. govern?Also, Democrats think of themselves more in governing terms — when they are in the minority, many like to cut deals, even if they are with the other side. Look at the contrast between Ted Kennedy, cutting a deal with George W. Bush on a Medicare prescription drug plan, and no Republican willing at all to work with Barack Obama on health reform.
Having said that, the fact is that the unusually united Republican minority in 2009 — operating in unison as if it were a parliamentary opposition — has had an effect on Democrats. They have been more disciplined and united in Congress than at any time in the more than 50 years Congressional Quarterly has been tracking votes. And President Obama, as a consequence, has had more success on those votes than any president in a half century.
But when Congress is operating as if it were a parliament, and the Senate minority is using obstructionist tactics in an unprecedented way, raising the bar to 60 votes on every issue from routine to major, Democrats need more than perfect unity. Sixty votes in the Senate are not always enough, especially if one of them is 92 years old and in precarious health. Fifty-nine united votes might never be enough.
The Myth of Republican Discipline
Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From World War II to the War on Terrorism.”
Democrats continually wonder why their party seems to have so much trouble holding their coalition together. The fact is, any major political coalition is unwieldy and hard to keep intact. It’s a myth that Republicans have had an easier time remaining united.
Republican presidents — from Eisenhower to Nixon to Bush — have also struggled to keep their coalitions together.
When in power, Republicans have always struggled to maintain control. During the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower engaged in fierce battles with Midwestern Republicans who were opposed to excessive foreign intervention and who did not think Eisenhower was doing enough to fight communism at home.
In the 1970s, Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford faced problems of their own. Ronald Reagan, the California governor at the time, and other fellow conservatives railed against the policy of détente, claiming that the G.O.P. was too willing to negotiate with the Soviets over arms control.
Reagan, who challenged Ford in the Republican primaries in 1976, complained that the G.O.P. had adopted Democratic domestic policies as well.
By 1982, one year into his own presidency, even Ronald Reagan was under attack from the very conservatives who propelled him into office. They charged that he was ignoring social issues like abortion and allowing continued government spending. In 1986 and 1987, they warned that he was being duped by Mikhail Gorbachev to agree to arms reductions. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, felt the ire of the right when Congressman Newt Gingrich stormed out of budget negotiations when the president abandoned his campaign pledge not to raise taxes.
And even President George W. Bush came under attack from the right for promoting “Big Government Conservatism” and allowing for a dangerous expansion of executive power.
Of course, the Democrats have struggled with keeping coalitions together. Between the 1930s and 1960s, one of the most skillful presidents to hold the office, F.D.R., had to deal with the deep division that existed between southern Democrats and northern Democrats over issues like race and unionization.
He left civil rights almost entirely off his agenda and agreed to design federal programs, like Old Age Assistance and Aid to Dependent Children in 1935, that protected the local autonomy of southern politicians and local racial structures. Today, President Obama faces divisions between “Red State Democrats” and “Blue State Democrats” who differ over issues such as deficits and government regulation.
The difficulties of keeping a coalition together have always been amplified by the legislative process — in F.D.R.’s case with the enormous power of committee chairs who tended to be Southerners and with Obama, the filibuster that forces 60 Senate votes.
The reality is that unity frequently turns on presidential leadership. Successful presidents either have to form grand compromises, like Roosevelt did, or they have to be willing to govern with a strong hand over members of their own party, like George W. Bush. If they are not willing or able to employ one of those tactics, they run the risk of watching their coalition implode.
Massachusetts Election Results 
