tossing Republican incumbents from office left and right. Obama’s
margin of victory, his mandate to change the way this country has been
run for the past eight years, couldn’t have been much wider.
Democrats hold a 78-seat majority in the House and are up by double
digits in the Senate. There’s no real reason to care, at all, what
Republicans think. If the Democratic party wants to get something done,
all they have to do is decide to do it. They’re doing Republicans a
favor by making concessions of any kind, on any bill, whatsoever.
They’re being nice.
Not that I expect that to matter. In the first place, Congressional
Democrats are rarely united, even on the party’s most basic principles
such as support for American labor and women’s reproductive freedom.
In the second place, Democrats in and out of office are so
Stockholm-syndrome stricken – so accustomed to bending over backward to
please the opposition – that some concessions to a party with no
leverage at all seem not just necessary but proper. They’ve spent so
much time pleasing a Republican president and his once-popular
Republican allies, pleasing them with votes to go to war with Iraq, spy
on Americans, illegally imprison and torture, that finding their guts
is going to take a searchlight and posse.
A.