Those Disorganized Dems

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 9, 2006 10:12 AM

In case you were wondering where some pundits get their views, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson provided a clue yesterday: from his 92-year-old mother.

Her shopping list one day said, "Coca-Cola." And then: "Impeach Bush." Underlined. (Meyerson doesn't favor impeachment, but you get my drift.)

In recent days, some new conventional wisdom has been hardening like ready-mix cement. To wit, Bush is in trouble, the Republicans are in trouble, Bush is in trouble with Republicans, and the litany of Iraq plus Katrina plus ports plus Miers plus eavesdropping puts the GOP in grave danger in 2006. But . . . the Democrats may be too disorganized to take advantage, thus fumbling away any chance to retake the House.

Now I'm awfully wary of any predictions made in March of an election year. And it's also hard for the opposition party to speak with one voice--or any voice, considering that Bush is on cable every day and Reid and Pelosi rarely--when it doesn't control so much as a hot-dog stand in Washington.

There is no question that President Bush's standing has significantly eroded, as the GOP revolt on the ports deal makes abundantly clear. It's also true that he's not on the ballot in November, and most incumbents win reelection these days, regardless of what the polls say about the mood of the country.

Yet it is also unclear what the Democrats stand for beyond opposition to Bush. The public thinks the president has messed up in Iraq but doesn't trust the Dems to find a solution either. It's too soon to know how this plays out in the midterms.

As for the emerging wisdom I referred to, here's Adam Nagourney in the New York Times :

"From Arizona to Pennsylvania, from Colorado to Connecticut, Democratic candidates for Congress are reading from a stack of different scripts these days...

"These scattershot messages reflect what officials in both parties say are vulnerabilities among Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as President Bush's weakened political condition in this election year.

"But they also reflect splits within the party about what it means to be a Democrat -- and what a winning Democratic formula will be -- after years in which conservative ideas have dominated the national policy debate and helped win elections."

Now before I recount the WashPost version of that story, here's what the blog Supreme Irony had to say about it:

"The Washington Post writes yet another hit piece on Democrats. This time focusing on message planning:

"News about GOP political corruption, inept hurricane response and chaos in Iraq has lifted Democrats' hopes of winning control of Congress this fall. But seizing the opportunity has not been easy, as they found when they tried to unveil an agenda of their own.

"WaPo staff writers Murray and Babington push the conventional wisdom that Democrats outside of Washington need to have Democrats inside Washington tell them what to do; reviving the Republican's 'Contract with America' that, although none of the points presented were actually accomplished, was used in the 1994 campaign to take over Congress; and general Democratic party disunity.

"The entire thrust of this article is to promote the divide between Congressional Democrats and the rest of the party for, what I can only guess is, the purposes of sowing discontent. Between the previous articles that repeatedly revived the Congressional Dems vs. Howard Dean, and now Congressional Dems vs. all other Dems, we are left with the impression of the Washington Post as Republican stooge (truth be told, we already knew that)."

Republican stooge ? Here is who is quoted, by name, in the piece: Reps. Jim Cooper, Rahm Emanuel and Tom Carper, a Pelosi spokesman, Sens. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, and Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski. They all talk about grasping to find the right message. Since when did calling up politicians and interviewing them become for "the purposes of sowing discontent"? I had thought it was called reporting.

The Washington Post piece goes on to say:

"Some Democrats fear that the hesitant handling [of a unified message] is symbolic of larger problems facing the party in trying to seize control of the House and Senate after more than a decade of almost unbroken minority status. Lawmakers and strategists have complained about erratic or uncertain leadership and repeated delays in resolving important issues.

"The conflict goes well beyond Capitol Hill. The failure of congressional leaders to deliver a clear message has left some Democratic governors deeply frustrated and at odds with Washington Democrats over strategy.

"Party leaders, for example, have yet to decide whether Democrats should focus on a sharply negative campaign against President Bush and the Republicans, by jumping on debacles such as the administration's handling of the Dubai port deal -- or stress their own priorities and values."

In his Post column, E.J. Dionne takes issue with this sort of thing:

"It is now an ingrained journalistic habit: After a period of bad news for President Bush, media outlets invariably devote time and space to 'balancing' stories that all say more or less: 'Yes, the Republicans are in trouble, but the Democrats have no alternatives, no plans,' etc. . . .

"The stories about the Democrats are by no means flatly false -- Democrats don't yet have a fully worked-out alternative program -- but they are based on a false premise, and they underestimate what I'll call the positive power of negative thinking.

"The false premise is that oppositions win midterm elections by offering a clear program, such as the Republicans' 1994 Contract With America." Actually, he quotes Republicans as saying, it was antipathy toward Clinton.

But that doesn't prove that the whither-Democrats stories amount to phony balance. It's just that E.J. believes it doesn't matter much if the Dems have an agenda or not.

Harry Shearer sees evidence in the Post story--a passage that also jumped out at me--of "everything that's wrong about our purported opposition party. . . . Here's the essential nugget, about the long-running argument inside the party over its 'new' slogan:

"That slogan -- 'Together, America Can Do Better' -- was revived from the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry. It was the last line of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's response to President Bush's State of the Union address, and Reid, Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have used it in speeches. But there is an effort afoot to drop the word 'together.' It tests well in focus groups and audiences, Democratic sources said, but it makes the syntax incorrect.

"That's right. The Democrats borrowed their new slogan from John Kerry, and they're spending the early part of this election year arguing about its syntax. Case closed."

They're focus-grouping a mere slogan?

The ports deal, meanwhile, is taking on water, as the L.A. Times reports:

"In a stinging rebuke to President Bush, a lopsided and bipartisan majority of a major House committee voted Wednesday to nullify portions of a deal that would hand operation of U.S. port facilities to a Dubai company. Congress and the White House advanced on a collision course as the House Appropriations Committee approved a measure that Bush has promised to veto -- and attached it to a bill the president dearly wants."

Baltimore Sun : "In a rare slap at President Bush, a powerful Republican-controlled House committee voted overwhelmingly yesterday to torpedo a deal allowing a United Arab Emirates company to take control of some operations at the port of Baltimore and five other major seaports."

NYT : "The House effort marked a remarkable public breach with the White House after years of working in tandem or quietly settling any differences behind closed doors."

Arianna Huffington tackles Don Rumsfeld's argument that, as she puts it, "the media has blown this whole civil war thing out of proportion: 'From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation.' Sure, what's a little sectarian bloodshed among warring factions, right? As the man said: 'Stuff happens.'

"Rumsfeld was even more expansive on the 'press problem' during an interview he gave on Friday to Plum TV, a local TV outlet in Vail, Colorado. 'The impression one gets by reading the press,' he said, 'is that Iraq is aflame. I was over there a month, I guess, ago, and every time I go it's not aflame.' This raises the question: just what does he see when he goes to Iraq? Must not be the same scenery all those hyperbolic reporters are seeing. Or maybe he just has a narrower definition of 'aflame' (ie if the entire country doesn't resemble the 'Backdraft' ride at Universal Studios, then it's "not aflame").

"More from Don Rumsfeld, media critic: 'If you put a generator into a hospital and save people's lives, it's not newsworthy. . . . What's newsworthy is when some terrorist straps himself up with a suicide vest and goes in and kills a bunch of innocent Iraqis.' On some sick level, you can almost admire these guys' gumption: They fight an unnecessary war, create a nightmare in Iraq, and they want us to focus on hospital generators. And check out this self-contradicting media-bashing Rumsfeld gem: 'The impression that one gets from the media that [Iraq] is in total disarray simply isn't accurate. That is not to say that what is being reported doesn't happen. It does.' And: 'I think that people do understand that [the media] dramatizes things. But that's not to say it's inaccurate.'

"Got that? It's not that what reporters are reporting 'doesn't happen' or is 'inaccurate,' it's that what they are reporting is 'exaggerated' and filled with 'a steady stream of errors.' Ionesco would have been proud. I half-expected Rummy to turn into a rhinoceros in mid-sentence."

John Aravosis at Americablog is disgusted by the GOP "compromise" on warrantless eavesdropping:

"No matter how much Olympia Snowe tries to spin this, she caved to Bush, again. There really are no Republican Senators who actually stand up to Bush -- and there is NO SUCH thing as a moderate Republican Senator."

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait accuses ABC of airbrushing history:

"ABC News has commissioned a poll on John McCain and Hillary Clinton. It contains one head-slapping passage:

"Almost three-quarters of conservative Republicans have strongly negative feelings toward [Clinton]--likely the long hangover from her 'vast right-wing conspiracy' complaint.

"Was the author of this story alive during the 1990s? Could even the staunchest Clinton-hater believe that conservative dislike for Hillary Clinton is a result of her 'vast-right wing conspiracy' remark? Conservatives loathed her long before she made this comment, in 1998--some five years after she appeared on the cover of the American Spectator portrayed as a witch. Indeed, agree with it or not, Clinton's invoking of a vast right-wing conspiracy was in part her attempt to explain why conservatives hated her so much. You can claim that conservatives hate her for entirely legitimate reasons. But the notion that her comment somehow triggered that antagonism is just loopy."

Power Line's John Hinderaker , citing Cheney's warning to Iran, is already anticipating the liberal response to military action:

"Hard as it is to believe that the administration is prepared to take military action against Iran, it is equally hard to imagine that its strong words on Iran are insincere. And taking action against Iran would certainly be consistent with the rationale of the Iraq war. One of the reasons for deposing Saddam was the fear that his regime might equip terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction. That rationale applies, with more or less equal force, to Iran's Mullahs, who unquestionably are pursuing nuclear weapons, and equally unquestionably are major sponsors of terrorism.

"If the administration does act against Iran's nuclear program, it will be interesting to see how American liberals respond. Will the Mullahs suddenly be transformed into innocents with no known 'operational relationship' with al Qaeda? We may soon find out."

TPM Muckraker takes delight in perusing the clips about a certain GOP Senate candidate in Florida:

"Here's the kind of lede you never want to see as a candidate, particularly if you're a makeup-happy Republican running for Senate in Florida: 'Katherine Harris has seen better days.'

"Or try this one: 'If you heard a big implosion during the weekend, it may have been the sound of Katherine Harris' campaign.'

"Or, my favorite: 'A yet-to-be-identified Hawaiian has almost as much of a chance of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate as Longboat Key Republican Katherine Harris[.]'

"A yet-to-be-identified Hawaiian? Ouch. It was just a few checks, and dinner with a dirty contractor! And an attempted earmark . . . and . . .

"Whatever words they use, it seems the press corps have spoken: Get a fork out, Mabel. I think she's just about done.

"If you want more evidence Harris is on the ropes -- or if you ever wondered if politics is like junior high -- here's this: the latest blow to the Harris campaign is that Dick Cheney didn't say her name at a recent Florida event."

The ultimate insult!

A shocking discovery here about vacationing young women:

"Leading researchers have discovered the obvious: College kids, booze and bikinis are a dangerous mixture," says the Washington Times . "Spring break has become an unhealthy 'binge-fest,' says the head of a major medical association, citing a poll that shows that 74 percent of female college students agree that alcohol is an excuse for outrageous behavior."

Finally, media analyst Matthew Felling wants Bob Schieffer to stay in the anchor chair, and he has a plan:

"Schieffer is working out well for the 'CBS Evening News.' He's liking the gig. And people as varied as Entertainment Weekly readers and Walter Cronkite agree on his superiority to the Katie Couric Experiment, which will cost easily over $5 million dollars a year.

"My suggestion is: Move the 'CBS Evening News' to Washington, DC, let Schieffer do it until he can't or won't, and then tap the next in line -- whether it's next year or 2010 -- from a revitalized news department. . . . Take the money that you were willing to pony up for Couric, put it into set design for the CBS building on M Street here in Washington, and start broadcasting from there by September, grabbing the pole position for the mid-term elections."

But wouldn't the newscast then suffer from the dread disease Beltwayitis?