The Democrats have won quite a few legislative victories, considering they're in the minority. In fact, more victories than any minority since the Republican minority in early 1994. But to hear the mainstream media (and sadly, often even the blogosphere) tell it, you'd never notice.
Anyone old enough to remember 1994, and blessed with a really accurate memory, is probably getting Deja Vu. And if you aren't, here's why you should be.
I've always had a vague sense that the Democrats are doing better than their worst detractors claim, since they have many times derailed a GOP-pushed idea or proposal. But until now, almost nobody seemed to really comment on how the Democrats had truly awakened after the 2004 defeats. A great article by Amy Sullivan at Washington Monthly at last crystallizes what I've thought for a while: not only are the Democrats doing well, we're doing maybe better than we have in over 20 years.
She starts out noting the long-worn-our stereotype of the "divided, helpless Democrats."
Democrats are lame, feckless, timid, and hopelessly divided, with no ideas, no vision, no message, and no future: You'll never fall flat at a Washington party by repeating this bit of conventional wisdom because everyone "knows" it to be true. Jon Stewart compares congressional Democrats to the fuzzy-but-not-fearsome Ewoks. The Onion gets an easy laugh from a parody headlined "Democrats Vow Not to Give Up Hopelessness."
Of course, there was some truth to that, she concedes, in 2002, and maybe even in 2004. But since then, it's almost insulting. Mostly because, if people hadn't been dazzled by the Satan-like glow of Newt Gingrich, they would have remembered what 1994 was like:
...the truth is that Newt Gingrich and his Contract loom so large--and today's DC Democrats seem so small--largely because of the magic of hindsight. Back in 1994, Republicans were at least as divided as Democrats are now, if not more so. Traditional statesmen like Robert Michel, Howard Baker, and Robert Dole were constantly at loggerheads with the conservative bomb-throwers like Gingrich, Bob Walker, and Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). As for unity of message, the now-revered Contract with America didn't make its debut until just six weeks before the election; Democratic pollster Mark Mellman recently pointed out that one week before Election Day, 71 percent of Americans said they hadn't heard anything about it. And while political journalists rushed to hail Gingrich's genius after the election, before November they were more likely to describe Republicans in terms we associate with Democrats today. "Republicans have taken to personal attacks on President Clinton because they have no ideas of their own to run on," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the summer of 1994, while a George F. Will column in the fall ran under the headline, "Timid GOP Not Ready for Prime Time."
Wow, George Will said the GOP wasn't ready for primetime on the eve of the "Republican Revolution!?" Damn.
At any rate, Sullivan noted the moment of change in the Democrats' demeanor as being just after the 2004 election. Every single slip-up, Sullivan notes, was not a Bush goof-up, it was the result of a carefully-laid Democrat trap. Did you know, for instance that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was the one who got the Dubai port deal out in the open? Schumer had been tipped off by a friend in the port security business, and help news conference after news conference until the press finally had to pay attention.
And then there was the Social Security proposal. Bush carefully went aroud to pre-screened crowds, simulating support for the idea. Everybody predicted a painful defeat for the Democrats. But then a funny thing happened: the Democrats stayed united, and Bush' big domestic pet project foundered. Just like Clinton's '94 health care changes foundered. Republicans then challenged Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to come up with a new plan, to which Reid indigantly told them that the Democrat plan was called Social Security.
And Sullivan views Reid and Pelosi as misunterstood, and actually much craftier politicians than most give them credit for:
Consider, for instance, what happened last fall when Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam veteran and hawk who initially supported the Iraq war, called for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. When reporters asked Pelosi what she thought of Murtha's statement, she replied that the congressman spoke for himself, not the caucus. Her response was immediately denounced by liberal critics and portrayed by reporters as evidence of Democrats' lack of message, discipline, and shared conviction. In fact, as Howard Fineman would later report, Pelosi had worked behind the scenes to convince Murtha to go public with his change of heart and orchestrated the timing of his announcement. Knowing that the credibility of Murtha's position would be damaged if it looked like he was the token hawk being used by "cut and run" liberal Democrats, Pelosi made the strategic calculation to put Murtha in the spotlight by himself for a few weeks before stepping forward to endorse his suggestion.
And then there was Reid's closed session gamble, which caught the GOP with it's pants down and forced the intelligence report back into the news. That, argues Sullivan, is the kind of political strong-arming that Daschle never tried. It was a sign of a newer, angrier Democratic party, and that was never more apparent than when Jean Schmidt called Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) a "coward." She was greeted by a round on angry "boo"s, and an irate Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) pointed an accusing finger at Schmidt and challenged her to "say that to Jack's face." Schmidt later quetly asked that he rwords be stricken from the record.
And there are scores of other examples:
When in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bush quietly suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in order to allow federal contractors to avoid paying the prevailing wage to workers involved in clean-up efforts, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) led Democrats in handing the president a rare defeat. Appalled that "the President has exploited a national tragedy to cut workers' wages," Miller unearthed a little-used provision of a 1976 law that allows Congress to countermand the president's authority to suspend laws after a national emergency. While it is usually nearly impossible for Democrats to get bills through the all-powerful House Rules Committee, Miller's maneuver would have bypassed that step and guaranteed an automatic vote by the full House. Bush, faced with a vote he was sure to lose, reversed his earlier action and reinstated Davis-Bacon.
Interestingly, Sullivan notes that one of the Democrats most annoyed at the popular, incorrect perception is frequent DKos guest Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY). As to why Democrats don't get noticed when they win, Slaughter put it this way: "nobody knows what we're doing up here because nobody ever covers it." As Sullivan puts it:
When reporters do write about Democratic victories, they often omit the protagonists from the story completely, leaving readers to wonder why Republicans would change course out of the blue. A Washington Post article about the Ethics Committee rule change simply noted that "House Republicans overwhelmingly agreed to rescind rule changes," in the face, apparently, of phantom opposition. Or journalists give credit to maverick Republicans rather than acknowledge the success of a unified Democratic effort: The Associated Press covered Bush's reversal on Davis-Bacon by writing, "The White House promised to restore the 74-year-old Davis-Bacon prevailing wage protection on Nov. 8, following a meeting between chief of staff Andrew Card and a caucus of pro-labor Republicans." Or Bush is blamed for his own defeats, without any mention of an opposition effort, as with Social Security privatization.
But the biggest disappointment is how often Democratic bloggers seemed to take the GOP bait:
...the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) issued a crowing press release claiming that Nancy Pelosi had removed Slaughter's report (on Republican corruption) from her leadership website because of GOP pressure. Staff for both Slaughter and Pelosi got a chuckle out of the release because they knew the website simply automatically rotated the items featured on the homepage. But liberal bloggers jumped at the bait. To them, it was proof of Democratic cowardice. Using the NRCC release as his source, Matt Stoller at MyDD.com complained about Democratic "knuckling-under." David Sirota went further, writing: "[T]he House Democratic Leadership publicly pee[d] down its leg in knee-shaking fright, removing a major report on Republican corruption from its website. Why? Because they feared the GOP would yell at them about it."
Sullivan notes that Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo once explored Paradign Theory, the idea that "people can hold fast to a theory or narrative even as vast amounts of contradictory evidence piles up." And so it is that the Democrats, even though they vote together 88% of the time (only 1% less than the supposedly hyper-organized Republicans) and still be pissed on, even by their own people.
So what will change the narrative? Nothing short of a win in 2006. That was what it took in 1994, when most of the year reporters were still talking about how divided the GOP was.
As Joan Didion once put it, once people get to telling a story, they don't want to change the plot, no matter how badly the real plot has changed.