JONATHAN CHAIT NOVEMBER 10, 2010
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Matt Bai devotes his New York Times column to rebutting the fairly silly claim that Democrats are better off without their most conservative members, which is fine. But he also endorses the odd view that retaining Nancy Pelosi is at odds with winning back the majority:
If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a catastrophic midterm election night, it was their assumption that now, at least, the party’s leaders would have to focus on recapturing the political center. If nothing else, they reasoned, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be forced to step aside as party leader, yielding control to Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland congressman who had been the Blue Dogs’ ally in party leadership.
A week later, that hope appears to have been woefully misguided. Ms. Pelosi defied expectation by announcing that she wanted to stay on, forcing Mr. Hoyer into a potential fight to hold onto the No. 2 spot in the party leadership.
Of course, Pelosi was the Minority Leader when Democrats took back the House to begin with, so at the very least, her position in that job is not incompatible with winning the majority.
More strangely still, in Bai's (correct) defense of having moderates in the party, he picks some very odd historical examples:
Even during the great heyday of Democratic government in the 20th century, when the party enacted Social Security and Medicare and civil rights legislation, its dominance was possible only because Democrats had shaped a majority coalition made up of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives.
Civil rights? Southern conservatives voted against civil rights legislation en masse. Civil rights laws passed because of a large, cross-partisan majority among non-Southerners. Not only was controlling the majority not essential to marshaling that coalition, it was detrimental. The Southern Democrats who controlled committees bottled up civil rights legislation for years on end. Republican control of Congress would have enabled civil rights legislation to succeed earlier.
3 comments
"the fairly silly claim that Democrats are better off without their most conservative members" But the Democrats can be careful when the pick candidates to back in the primaries of conservative districts to try to find and reward team players, people who will, on the big things, put the country ahead of their re-election, people who will be willing to lose that seat for a great good like universal health insurance or cap-and-trade. The Democrats will eventually get the seat back when the Republicans hold the Presidency during a bad economic cycle. Those seats are a plus, but they're a lot more of a plus if the Democrats fill them with people who aren't selfish. People who will vote conservative most of the time out of necessity to keep the seat viable, but who will still be willing to vote non-conservative and lose their job when it's for the great net good of the country, like with big things that will be permanent once try-and-see'ed, i.e. universal health insurance, free bachelors degree, etc.
- RHSerlin
November 10, 2010 at 6:30pm
What has Matt Bai been smoking? I don't want any.
- liberal reformer
November 10, 2010 at 9:30pm
Chaitt makes an excellent and important point about civil rights. Dems these days have a distinctly ahistorical tic in suggesting that Republican resurgence was all about racism. In fact, Republicans have been crucial to the advance of civil rights from Lincoln through Eisenhower's deployment of troops to Little Rock and the key votes of Northern liberals in the Dirkson/Rockefeller mould. In fact, no policy of any real significance since the Civil War was enacted without strong bi-partisan support--until the recent Healthcare bill.
- Robert Powell
November 11, 2010 at 6:39am