Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

This summer, Time ran the cover article displayed at left about George Bush running up against the limits of going it alone. Well yesterday he ran up against an even more important limit - the amount of BS the public was willing to tolerate. So now that the Bush cowboys have been vanquished (note that real cowboys like John Tester are flourishing), certain questions are emerging to define our moment. These questions are based on the 'who' of the situation, and they boil down to these two: who is responsible for getting the Democrats here now? And who are the Democrats that are now here?

As for who got us here, there are three possible answers I'm looking at, including conservative, moderate, DLC-type Democrats; progressive, blog-friendly, liberal Democrats; and Republicans. As for who they are, duh, out of that selection the first two are the only possibilities.

Basic election coverage in both the New York Times and the Washington Post includes statements to the effect that the earthquake we've just seen was brought to us by conservative Democrats. The reasoning appears to go that only a more moderate or conservative Democrat could wrest a Republican seat away from said Republican, plus newly elected Democrats like Heath Shuler (NC-11) and Bob Casey (PA-Sen) are not supporters of abortion rights. Others in the MSM are eager to credit Rahm Emanuel with hatching a brilliant strategy that paid off big time.

Fortunately, these two arguments are easy to dismiss. Voters pretty clearly repudiated conservatism in favor of liberalism (judging by the exit polls), and a lot of the newbies just aren't that conservative anyway. While Shuler and Casey might be more conservative than Sherrod Brown (OH-Sen), they share one particularly notable quality - economic populism. In addition to Brown, Democrats added some bona fide progressives in Jerry McNerney (CA-11), John Yarmuth (KY-03), and Tim Walz (MN-01). So that takes care of the illusion that somehow going centrist was a national recipe for Democratic success.

As for Rahm Emanuel, the worst thing since un-sliced bread, I guess I'll start with the positives: he raised a huge amount of money, and he recruited several candidates. Good. Now let's jump right into the bad stuff. There is absolutely no doubt that we won the House despite Rahm Emanuel, not because of him. Per the article in the preceding link, here's his rap sheet:

• Constantly recruited candidatest for primaries against more progressive Democrats that were otherwise unopposed, including McNerney and Yarmuth. Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) was another Rahm recruit, from out of district, who won her primary but lost the general election despite the $3 million Rahm dumped into her race; her primary opponent, Cegelis, got really close to Henry Hyde last cycle with very little help. Michael Arcuri (NY-24) is another example of a Rahm primary recruit, but he won his general election.
• Stiffed in the general election any candidate who ran against one of his primary choices. There was no money forthcoming from the DCCC for candidates like Yarmouth and McNerney, and candidates like Larry Kissell (NC-08) who did receive some support are now locked in statistical dead heats that probably could have been broken with some of the $3 million Rahm poured into losing IL-06 (although of course we were all pulling for Tammy).
• Warned of gloom and doom if Democrats ever made the mistake of talking about the Iraq war, and we all know how much voters supported the Republican position on that.

Republicans obviously don't make up the new crop of Democratic winners (except in Kansas, where there were multiple defections from R to D), so let's think about whether they gave the election away. They raised a ton of money, they ran some really nasty ads, and they did everything in their vicious power to paint Democrats as whatever they liked. For their part, Democrats ran their 50-state strategy, expaned the field of contested seats, and hit hard on Iraq. So while we couldn't have done it without the Republicans, I think we earned it.

If many of the new Democrats entering Congress will be reasonably progressive, who will the rest of the Democrats be? Well, some of the most important ones, committee chairs, will be liberals - Conyers (MI), Waxman (CA), Rangell (NY) are some of the names now giving Republicans nightmares. You see, although Republicans abolished the practice of giving chairmanships based on seniority, Democrats didn't, and the Democrats with the longest service are (no surprise) the ones in the most liberal districts. So the composition of our august legislature, brought to you by the left wing of the party, will also be largely leftist.

The new Democratic majority is also the first since 1920 to come to power without a majority of seats in the South. Liberals like Tom Schaller have been arguing for some time that this is precisely the party makeup Democrats should be embracing anyway. And, indeed, it does seem that it will alow a less compromising brand of liberalism to guide the new party. Additional stability should come from the fact that PVI ratings (Partisan Voter Index - a measure of a district's underlying partisanship, independent of its elected representative, based on its presidential voting) for many new Democratic districts in the Northeast and Midwest lean Democratic. Since so much has changed in the last couple of years, I would guess that the next time PVI ratings come out, they will be more favorable to Democrats in some of the other new seats in the Mountain West and Midwest that currently look more Republican. These data put the nail in the coffin of the argument that it must take a conservative Democrat to capture one of these seats.

Another way people are asking the question "Who are the Democrats that are now here?" is in terms of what they will do and who they will invesitgate. For his part, Bush has made an overture for bipartisanship with Democrats. However, it should be remembered that Bush is an awful, malicious human being who probably doesn't mean it.

On a rhetorical level, it's a neck-snapping reversal from the savage smearing of Democrats as troop-hating terrorist-appeasing cowards that continued right up until last night, when the will of the voters became undeniable even by White House standards.

Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled off a bipartisanship-style reinvention of his image this year en route to easy reelection as governor of California after pushing a right-wing agenda last year, but suggesting that George Bush might be capable of coopting a Democratic platform to the same extent stretches the limits of believability. There's no way any voter wants the Democrats to jump right into retribution for the cockamamy investigations Republicans launched against Clinton, so Democrats have sensibly promised bipartisanship in holding the administration accountable. But it is essential going forward that they not resort to what some have started calling "date rape bipartisanship": giving in to the Republican agenda in the name of compromise. If Republicans want to be bipartisan in actually holding the administration accountable, actually fixing Medicare, or actually promoting alternative energy, I say give em a seat at the table. But our new, hard earned progressive influence in Congress shouldn't be wasted on the Lieberman-style "bipartisanship" of supporting Bush on Iraq and the privatization of Social Security.