Far More Unity Among Democrats Than Republicans

It's Not the Democrats Who Are Divided
Frank Rich, The New York Times
Sunday, November 19, 2006

"Elections may come and go, but Washington remains incorrigible. Not even voters delivering a clear message can topple the town's conventional wisdom once it has been set in the stone of punditry.

"Right now the capital is entranced by a fictional story line about the Democrats. As this narrative goes, the party's sweep of Congress was more or less an accident. The victory had little to do with the Democrats' actual beliefs and was instead solely the result of President Bush's unpopularity and a cunning backroom stunt by the campaign Machiavellis, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, to enlist a smattering of 'conservative' candidates to run in red states. In this retelling of the 2006 election, the signature race took place in Montana, where the victor was a gun-toting farmer with a flattop haircut: i.e., a Democrat in Republican drag. And now the party is deeply divided as its old liberals and new conservatives converge on Capitol Hill to slug it out.

"The only problem with this version of events is that it's not true. The overwhelming majority of the Democratic winners, including Jon Tester of Montana, are to the left of most Republicans, whether on economic policy or abortion. For all of the hyperventilation devoted to the Steny Hoyer-John Murtha bout for the House leadership, the final count was lopsided next to the one-vote margin in the G.O.P. Senate intramural that yielded that paragon of 'unity,' Trent Lott. But the most telling barometer is the election's defining issue: there is far more unanimity among Democrats about Iraq than there is among Republicans. Disengaging America from that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on Nov. 7, and that's what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up, whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it...

"...Already we are seeing conclusive evidence that the White House's post-thumpin' blather about bipartisanship is worth as little as the 'uniter, not a divider' bunk of the past. The tip-off came last week when Mr. Bush renominated a roster of choices for the federal appeals court that he knew faced certain rejection by Democrats. Why? To deliver a message to the entire Senate consonant with the unprintable greeting Dick Cheney once bestowed on Patrick Leahy, the senator from Vermont. That message was seconded by Tony Snow on Monday when David Gregory of NBC News asked him for a response to the Democrats' Iraq proposals. The press secretary belittled them as 'nonspecific' and then tried to deflect the matter entirely by snickering at Mr. Gregory's follow-up questions..."

Read the rest here.