Let me say first of all, my purpose here is not to point fingers, but to make comments and suggestions. My house is glass, and I gladly (or is that sadly?) acknowledge the fact.
Ne tirez pas sur le pianiste...
More or less ever since the Bush/Warner pact was announced last week, the more excitable elements of the sphere have been gnashing their teeth (if not weeping and wailing) over the deal and the complaisant reaction to it of leading Dem MCs, Harry Reid in the van.
By which time it was, of course, way too late to do anything about it. (Perhaps there was never a chance of doing anything about it.)
I only got looking at the subject in reaction to a piece of Jonathan Singer's last Sunday (all pieces here) - which seemed to me to be suggesting that Dem MCs should be supporting the Warner bill (S 3901) and opposing the regime's bill (S6054).
I didn't comment on the substance in that thread; but there were other comments suggesting the thing needed further consideration.
My follow-up piece on the Monday went further to suggest that
I'd say that was quite enough to warrant lefties - and Dem MCs most particularly - being very reluctant to accept the Warner compromise bill without a whole lot more study and reflection.
(We know that the current regime will take a yard if you give it an inch. And even a Dem regime can hardly be assumed trustworthy if written a black check.)
Still a
holding reply - but more doubtful of the merits of the Warner bill.
On Wednesday, came the report that the WH had given up trying to redefine the Geneva Conventions.
The indication was all one way:
The whole thing looks like a set-up: what better for beleaguered GOP MCs up in November to see a bit of steel from the 'rubber-stamp Congress'? And what more appropriate leadership for the rebels than McCain and Warner.
And the charade was clearly going to leave the Dem leadership up shit creek:
If, as seems likely, the compromise mostly favors the Warner bill, which Dems have supported, they have the choice of either going along and voting for the compromise; or nitpicking some change from S 3901 as reported out by the SASC as a pretext for voting against.
As far as the sphere was concerned, my comment in the piece was:
Meanwhile, the lefty sphere has failed to generate much passion about the - not terribly liberal - Warner bill. Pieces pointing out the bill's flaws.
But nothing like the visceral emotion generated by the notorious Clinton/blogger summit group photo.
That conclusion was drawn from nothing more than a squint at the latest results from Technorati - a more exhaustive search might have shown different. But there you are.
By Thursday, things were clearly moving to a conclusion. There were the antics in the House Judiciary Committee; news of the Bush/Warner pact being inked; thoughts of resistance in the House (it lasted less than 24 hours, in the event!).
By this stage, I was predicting that there would be passed a motion to table the Specter/Levin Amendment on habeas corpus and a 70-30 vote for cloture.
As for the Dems, their goose was cooked. Done to a crisp, in fact:
Where does the Warner/WH deal leave the Dems?
Bear in mind (my earlier pieces) that Reid's strategy has been to completely stay away from the substantive issues, but rather focus on the disarray between various elements of the GOP.
Now that this disarray has - disappeared (if it has), they've rather shot his fox. Anything the Dems say on the substance at this point has been devalued by their previous stance.
The Dems did, of course, have the opportunity as soon as the bills emerged from committee a week or ten days ago to take a principled stand on issues like Common Article 3 and habeas corpus. They most carefully avoided another such stand.
And, in the interim, the condemnation of the stance by the lefty sphere has not (so far as I'm aware) been deafening.
Finally, yesterday saw the House GOP announcing their agreement. All over.
By which time, the emoting from some sections of the lefty sphere was at storm force.
Now, I'm not pretending to have been some Cassandra who predicted disaster long ago; I was desperately late on the issue myself.
(Both House and Senate bills were reported out around 10 days ago - my sense would be that even then may have been too late to get any sort of lobbying effort going. But it's not my area of expertise, so I can't judge.)
But it seems to me that we have (at least) a couple of problems highlighted by the torture bill farrago:
First, there is no proactive early warning system for the lefty sphere across the whole range of legislation of interest. The standard pattern for bills that ultimately get enacted is that they hang around for months at various stages in their progress, and then lurch forward for no reason discernable to the outside observer.
Interest groups certainly monitor bills of specific interest to them; but there's no central system for collecting this info and making it available to the sphere as a whole.
Secondly, for a community that is self-described as reality-based, there seems a marked preference in the sphere for emotion untrammeled by facts or experience.
The regular calls for impeaching Bush, for instance; the wave of enthusiasm for filibustering the Alito nom way after it was perfectly clear that nothing of the sort was going to happen. Same with the Feingold censure resolution.
Now, the plain fact is that, barring the occasional emotional spasm (Reid taking the Senate into secret session last year, for instance), the Dem Congressional leaderships have long favored the incremental approach; not rocking the boat; avoiding appearing like bomb-throwers.
Clearly, that was not the only strategy available: no-holds barred guerilla warfare à la Gingrich in the 103rd would certainly have stirred up the base. But, whatever its merits, it's not the strategy that the leadership decided to go with under the Bush regime.
The reason: the Dems have been throughout too close to victory. They have had too much to lose. Especially now - with the GOP in disarray, they can almost taste control six weeks or so away from the election.
And neither Reid nor Pelosi have much Gingrich in them.
Now, emotion obviously plays its part in politics, that I can't deny. (The GOP do great business focusing on the widespread aversion to homosexuals and 'free-and-easy' morality with their Schiavo stunts and the like.)
But alongside emotional expression, issues like the torture bill surely demand a soundly fact-based evaluation, based on the world as it is, rather than that to which folks aspire? (With the guidance of past experience, where relevant.)
[Cross-posted at MyDD]