Are Democrats really so lame?

Republicans are on the ropes, but yet another mainstream media star says it's Democrats who are in trouble, thanks to Bush-hating bloggers and billionaires. Here we go again.

By Joan Walsh

Read more: George W. Bush, Joan Walsh, Democratic Party, Books, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Nixon, George Soros, MoveOn.org, Books Features, 2008 election

Aug. 21, 2007 | The Republican Party is the least respected institution in the U.S today, George W. Bush's poll numbers are nearing Nixonian lows, and GOP Congress members and Bush administration officials are rushing for the exits. In the last week Karl Rove and Tony Snow, plus House leaders Denny Hastert, Deb Pryce and Charles Pickering, were all suddenly possessed by a desire to spend more time with their families, or their lawyers. Meanwhile, Washington is already bickering over the administration's September progress report on the Iraq quagmire, which will almost certainly be bad news for Bush and the GOP politicians whose fortunes are sinking with his.

Of course, you know what that means: It's time for another book about those crazy, doomed, dysfunctional Democrats!

That's not an entirely fair way to set up Matt Bai's heralded anatomy of Democratic disarray in the Bush years: "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics." A book can have bad timing and still be right. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published "The Emerging Democratic Majority" just before Republicans cruised to a 2002 midterm victory, and it probably didn't help sales. But they were right about the big picture: Women, minorities, urbanites, professionals and new-economy workers were moving toward the Democrats, helping the party take back Congress in 2006. Maybe Bai's right, too, and the Democrats will ultimately be undone by two flaws he thinks are crippling: their failure to put together a big, bold social policy for the 21st century, and their "disabling hatred" of George W. Bush.

Maybe he's right, but "The Argument" didn't convince me. Bai's written a fascinating but ultimately bewildering book that offers occasional insight, since he was smart enough to pay attention to Howard Dean before he was "Howard Dean," and then to follow the netroots story Dean introduced, in frequent pieces for the New York Times Magazine since 2003. So we get firsthand reporting, exclusive access to early meetings (not all of which, sadly, are that interesting), and some compelling small portraiture -- the Democracy Alliance's Rob Stein, Yearly Kos organizer Gina Cooper, blogfather Jerome Armstrong, plus a damning look at the abortive presidential campaign of former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who in Bai's telling decided to cut and run rather than fight the lefty blogosphere "mob."

But for all its love of big bold ideas, "The Argument" is premised on a big, bold idea that's simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they'd do instead.

I wanted to agree with Bai, at times -- I love big, bold ideas, really I do. But I think the role of big, new ideas in political realignments is overrated. Bai's book is flawed by his failure to grapple with the negativity, lo, the hatred behind the Republican revolution of the '70s and '80s, some of which is still politically operative today. Does he really think Reagan rode to power on the Laffer curve, not by bashing Cadillac-driving welfare queens, scruffy war protesters and big bad government? Both Nixon and Reagan (George Bush I was merely Reagan's long tail) were the political beneficiaries of a resentful, sometimes racist reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s and '70s, associated with the Democrats, far more than they were the avatars of a wildly popular new way of running the country. Nixon borrowed more from George Wallace than he did William F. Buckley.

Forty years later, as Democrats gain power -- and they are likely to win the White House and strengthen their control of Congress next year despite the flaws Bai depicts -- it will be largely because voters think Republicans have gone too far in every imaginable way: starting a bloody, unnecessary war that puts the world at risk; corruption, incompetence and cronyism at home and abroad; a dramatic erosion of civil liberties that is literally changing what it means to be an American. For many voters, the Democrats' commitment to fight Republican overreaching isn't merely "negative" or anti-Bush, as Bai argues, it's an ambitious, positive program to restore the country's social, political, global, military and economic vitality. It's complex, and its ultimate success is far from certain. But to many voters it's as welcome as those helicopters flying in to rescue people stranded on their roofs during Hurricane Katrina two summers ago.

How did Bai, with an eye for a good story, go wrong? It's important to remember he got started after the dismal 2002 midterms and did a chunk of his work after the Dean boom went bust and Sen. John Kerry lost to Bush in 2004; he barely had time to assimilate the startling results of the 2006 election, and it shows. Clearly Bai was ground down by interminable meetings where Democrats flagellated themselves for their failures in 2002 and 2004, and searched for gurus to get them out of the wilderness. Time spent that way will cost anybody some IQ points. Chunks of the book are painful to relive: the party's obsession with framing expert George Lakoff, religious lefty Jim Wallis, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" author Thomas Frank, each man embraced by this or that leading Democrat as though he's Moses leading them to the promised land. We witness the sordid spectacle of wealthy Democrats whining about their impotence. "We are so tired of being disenfranchised!" billionaire Lynda Resnick wails at a lavish 2004 book party for Arianna Huffington. For some of the people Bai interviewed, the solution that emerges from all this wailing and rending of expensive garments seems to be that rich Democrats and smart people must unite and give the party what it needs: the benefit of their big brains and bigger bank accounts, but only on terms dictated by the rich folks, preferably in meetings held at fancy resorts.

Next page: "As a first date, this is pretty damn cool!"