Much of the ink spilled about the race between Hoyer and Murtha for Majority leader has missed the point. Howard Fineman is typical:
If Speaker-to-be Pelosi is going to succeed as Speaker of the House, she had better learn—fast—from the fiasco known as the Hoyer-Murtha Race. She violated every conceivable rule of Boss-like behavior: she lost, she lost publicly, she lost after issuing useless and unenforceable threats to people she barely had met, knowing (or having reason to know) that they would tell the world about her unsuccessful arm-twisting. And she lost big: by 149 to 86 votes.
One of the first rules of politics is that power is the appearance of power.
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In the last week the Hill and the city were abuzz with stories about Pelosi’s hard-line tactics. But rather than engender fear—and remember, it is better to be feared than loved—the moves engendered derision. The last thing you want them to be doing is laughing at you.
A lot of liberals think that Republicans were dominant because they were a machine; in fact, they lost because they were a machine. The Gingrich-Armey revolution was fueled by ideas and reform rather than pork and log-rolling, which destroyed it.
John Podhoretz gets it right:
There are reasons to question Pelosi’s political judgment, as Murtha’s bungled majority leader bid demonstrates. The fact that Democrats did question it and went their own way suggests they’re not going to march over a cliff behind Pelosi, whose views constitute almost a caricature of American left-liberalism at its most provincial.
And the fact that they supported a strong majority leader in Steny Hoyer means that they voted for a certain amount of creative tension at the top of the House – which is probably all to the good.
When GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich was running things in 1995 and 1996 without that creative tension, he got off to a decent start . . . before driving himself and his caucus straight into a brick wall where public opinion and policy were concerned.
As for Carville and Dean, that fight too is a mark of partisan health. Dean has been a bad chairman of the party, and he also deserves little or no credit for the midterm victories. He won the party chairmanship the old-fashioned way – by promising to throw money in every direction to every state party. That promise earned him support from Democrats in places like Mississippi and Utah hungry for D.C. cash, but spending in that way is little more than quixotic frivolity.
Democrats interested in building on their successes need to have these kinds of fights, quarrels and power struggles. When parties fail to have these clarifying battles, they end up making the kinds of disastrous errors that helped derail the Republican reform agenda and gave Democrats running room to trounce GOP Hill hacks as they did last week.
It’s good for the country that Democrats are fighting back towards sanity. It makes it more difficult for Republicans, but that’s fine, too. They spent much of the last 6 years winning ugly; a stronger Democratic will force Republicans to improve themselves.
Posted by Hubbard in Politics, The Democratic Congress