Democrats Between Past and Future

The question on everyone's mind right now is 'having won, what are the Democrats going to do?' Leading Democrats have dropped strong hints that there will be no bold initiatives for the future. A discussion of the Patriot Act, of perhaps repealing some of its provisions, is not even priority enough to have been mentioned in any of the major dailies - let alone suggested as a possibility by incoming House and Senate leadership. A recent New York Times article reports Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, saying they will "re-examine" the lop-sided tax structure, but make no promises, and won't even get to that for at least six months.

Meanwhile, although the Democrats ran on the 'platform' of holding Bush and the Republicans accountable for their mistakes on Iraq (and elsewhere), the incoming House leadership have bent over backwards to make clear that impeachment is not an option. This was predictable (and impeachment was a bad idea to begin with). But Schumer has done even more to suppress expectations, saying on CNN recently that "we’re not going to hold a whole raft of hearings pointing a finger back at 2001." No doubt this is in part because any hearings, if conducted properly, would reveal just how complicit the Democrats have been in creating the current situation, both in their 'ayes' and unwillingness to 'nay.'

But the deeper question is this: if the Democrats are not planning on presenting an bold initiatives for the future, and don't want to investigate the past, then what is left for the present? Prepare for the 2008 election, which, if they win, will no doubt position them well for the 2010 mid-terms...Many Democrats insisted that once the Democrats were elected, they would begin to act like an opposition. But the opposite seems more likely to be the case. The more committed you are to winning elections every two years, the more unwilling you are to take political risks and stand on principle. The election cycle has a tendency to induce a false pragmatism and unnecessary moderation - the imperative of winning overwhelms all else, leaving you eternally trapped in the present, neither reflecting on the past, nor contemplating the future.