Big Win, Big Decision, Big Mistake? (5-9-04) What happened? We’ve said before, and we’ll say again, the Democrats should win a strong majority in the House, if only for the fact that the GOP has shown to be completely incompetent when it comes to running Congress. Instead, they’ve managed to do what no other party has done in more than 80 years of this type of divided government—lose seats. Why? There’s no such thing as a perfect set of circumstances, no matter how good you are. In a word, the war on terror was just too damn complicated to not screw up a bit. It seemed, at first, that Iraq had taken a turn for the better, but as the summer went along, the situation continued to deteriorate. This week, it became official: a few hundred American soldiers have lost their lives in an operation to liberate the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. And it seems like only yesterday that Bush was telling us that Iraq was going to be an easy mission. To be honest, had there been a strong Democratic majority in Congress, we probably wouldn’t be there right now. But even with all that, the Dems still lost a lot of seats in Congress. To make matters worse, a couple of those seats went to Republicans who won by defeating Republicans in the primary and running as independents in the general election. So the result was devastating to those who thought this was going to be a good election for them. Instead, they’re left with the worst scenario—a strong GOP majority with a new Speaker of the House that’s not going to let the Democrats have any say. What did they learn? The problem here is a lack of leadership. This goes all the way back to Tom DeLay, who had a big part in passing the first Iraq war resolution. He was too busy playing with his buddies at the Triplets of Belleville to have anything to do with governing. A few years later, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay helped Dick Cheney pull off a similar trick—a resolution against Saddam being rammed through before it was discussed. DeLay was a clown—but one of the biggest clowns in Congress, which put him in a position to be a strong Speaker of the House. Then there’s Armey, who was supposed to be the man who kept a close eye on Cheney, but instead he didn’t give a rat’s ass about being Speaker of the House. Again, it had to do with not having a close-enough relationship with Cheney. Then came Dennis Hastert. Hastert is a political animal. He’s always kept his nose in the middle of the pack, because that way he never has to sweat his way up to the top. So right after he was reelected to a sixth term in Congress, he immediately resigned as Speaker of the House. He could have stayed as a power broker, but he decided that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be the Man on the Hill. In spite of everything else, Dick Cheney’s going to be Speaker of the House. The Democrats will have no say. They can’t even run a bill on the floor if they wanted to, because they’re not going to get it out of the Rules Committee. The Republicans won big in 2004. There’s no denying that, but they made a huge mistake by not selecting somebody that Democrats like to work with, or by electing somebody in their own party who’s so weak that they’ll just have to go along with whoever the Republicans want. The Republicans picked Hastert, the same guy who quit as Speaker in 1998 and who wanted a position he was too weak to ever get. Hastert was no longer the Republican majority leader, which would have been a tough job for anybody. So the Republicans got a guy who won’t be as strong as he could have been. Who knows? Maybe next time, the Republicans will get somebody who’s even weaker than Hastert. But the Democrats didn’t get anything out of this election. Maybe they should have given Dems up in the Northeast to Hillary and put Democrats in swing seats everywhere else. Instead, that would have left the Democrats in the minority, but at least the party would have gotten some things done. We could probably say the same about the Republicans. The Democrats took it in the mouth, but they also gave Dems all the swing districts they wanted. In this instance, you can blame a lot of the loss of House seats on gerrymandering. Democrats could have taken seats, but didn’t because they’d have to give them up to Republicans, too. What they really need to do is redraw districts to get rid of the gerrymanders. Then they need to stop taking on the far-right on all these social issues like abortion, gay rights and gun control, and start concentrating on the bread-and-butter issues that most people care about—jobs, health care, the environment. In terms of health care, which is likely to be the biggest issue in the next several years, it would be great if the Democrats could run on universal health care. No matter how strongly they’re in the majority, the Dems will still need the Republicans for anything to happen in the Senate. While Harry Reid is great, the GOP has control of the Senate. Maybe 2004 isn’t such a bad year for the GOP after all. It looks like they’ve got one fewer seat in Congress than they thought they were going to have, but they’ve got the reins of power in the Senate and in the White House. And with Democrats divided over how to handle this election, the Republicans are well-positioned for 2004, if only because it gives them a year to work on their game. However, if they don’t start showing some leadership by making some deals, making some laws, and getting at least a majority of the Senate Democrats on board, all bets are off—a majority of one doesn’t mean anything, and they can go all the way to the White House. Here’s what we think: The thing about the GOP was never really their agenda, though it was in the back of many Republican minds. They wanted to put an end to a Democratic president and have the GOP back in control of the White House for a decade. They almost got it. It was never about being President Bush’s party. If that were the case, then they would have been able to do as they pleased. What they had to do was convince people that they were going to get things done, and the way to do that was by following Bush’s agenda. Instead, the Republicans went in the opposite direction of the agenda. It wasn’t the conservative agenda, but rather the agenda of the far-right. So what did they gain? The fact that they went to war in Iraq, and now it looks like they’re going to go to war with Iran. They’re also going to do things like privatize Social Security and Medicare and turn Medicare into a voucher system. And now they’re talking about tax cuts that are so huge, even President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on. They made these promises, not because they were the right decisions—which was almost sure that they wouldn’t be—but because it was good politics, and these promises were the way to get elected. If that’s the way politics works, then we need some new players in Washington. The Dems didn’t lose on the agenda, but they lost by not having a strong enough agenda to say to the American people what they could do for them and how they could improve the country’s financial situation. The Dems also need to get the Democrats together in both Houses. Right now, the Democrats are so divided, they aren’t even talking to each other about most of these issues. This election wasn’t lost because of war, or big business, or even the fact that they ran out of money. The war was great for a lot of people. And, big business spent a lot of money, and it didn’t hurt anybody but the taxpayers and the working class. The main reason the Dems lost was that they didn’t offer an agenda that was more appealing than what the Republicans offered. It’s not like the Dems don’t have an agenda. They have one; it just isn’t strong enough to counter what the Republicans are selling. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s an election in 2008, and whoever wins in 2008 is probably going to win for the next two presidential elections. That means there’s a chance for a lot of new faces in the Democratic Party. There’s still time for the Dems to get their act together, but they’re going to have to get it together soon.