Fallout of Denial

The Newsprint

Timothy Noah over at Slate has decided that the time has come (maybe) for Democrats to take the nuclear option and eradicate the filibuster. That's right. Faced with electoral repudiation in Massachusetts and plummeting poll numbers suggesting that the public is now roundly against the proposed health care reform bill, Noah's answer is to cheat. Sound familiar?

Ok, maybe cheating is too strong a word. But if not cheating, what do you call changing the rules midway through the process? And having them changed at the behest of the executive branch to boot! Unless of course Noah is ready to buy into Dick Cheney's hogwash about the indeterminacy of the Vice-Presidency's role in government. Methinks not. For support, I'll go to Rahm.

Anyhow, what's the bigger issue here? Liberals in the Democratic Party are so convinced of both the basic justness and the inherent appeal of their ideas that they refuse to change. At first, as we've seen, they deny that their ideas have failed and blame either conventional bogeymen like racism, sexism, or some other such -ism. Next, they blame their own (see the Coakley recrimination circus or the Obama personality-meter stories previously cited). After that delusion wears off, they blame the ghosts of Republicans past and present. And finally, they blame the rules of the game. At no point do they blame the ideas themselves.

The irony, of course, is that Obama seemed to get this during the campaign. He famously described the GOP as the "party of ideas" and took a great deal of heat for it from within his own ranks. And while no serious person bought his vacuous claims for "good government rather than more or less government," it suggested that the President understood that a return to Great Society boilerplate would be political hari kiri.

Instead, a year in we've seen a presidency remarkable for its complete lack of creativity. It's as if the Great Society and its subsequent failure never happened. As a result, the White House announced that it's considering a three year spending freeze in direct contradiction of the President's campaign. Moreover, Harry Reid is looking to be the second consecutive Democratic Senate leader to go down to electoral defeat this fall.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

UPDATE: Here's a small piece on the filibuster by Greg Koger at the University of Miami's Political Science Department.