REPORTS OF THEIR DEATH

. . .greatly exaggerated. All the claims about the weakness of the Democratic party (some of it served up with a heavy dose of Schadenfreude) ignore an absolutely central fact: the country is very evenly divided along partisan lines. It will not take all that much to give the Democrats control over any of the branches of government in 2004. In fact, the increased partisan shrillness is a direct result of the narrowness of the Republican party's hold on power. If (as OTB quotes Tony Blankely as saying) the Republicans had been so good at convincing Americans that huge tax cuts were the way to go, it wouldn't have taken a tie-breaking vote by Dick Cheney to pass the recent tax bill. And it should never be forgotten that a better ballot design in a few counties in Florida, or an earlier challenge to Jeb Bush's purging of the voter rolls of minority voters in FL (to pick two examples), or even just a process that was better at tracking voter intent or majority will, would have given Al Gore the Presidency, and then we would have been talking about whether the Republican resurgence of the 1990s had reached its peak.

MORE: Kim Osterwalder was inspired by the same Joe Lieberman interview that I heard the other day, even though there won't be an official free pie endorsement of Joe Lieberman unless he's the last man standing. Read the post: Lieberman is at least able to articulate several points at which the Bush administration is very vulnerable: lack of postwar planning for Iraq and the need for a multinational body for transition to civilian rule, for example. Much of the rest of Lieberman's interview was also dead on. Here are my favorite lines:

One of the things I argue here is that one of the great things about America is that we respect each other's faiths. In the same way we ought to respect the differing directions in which our faiths take us in terms of politics and public issues. There are times when this administration seems to be arguing that... if your faith matters to you, it can only take you in one direction, which is to extremely conservative politicalky values or positions. I think that's not only not right, it's not consistent with our history where faith has been a great source of progress -- abolitionist movements, civil rights, etc., movements that were considered liberal or progressive in their day. But it's also not tolerant and it's not unifying... the Bush social agenda has really taken us so far to the right that I believe that it's separated the American people at a time, because of all the threats we have, when we really most need to be united.

Historically this view has its problems: abolitionism was most assuredly not a unifying force, nor was the civil rights movement, really. But it would have been nice if they had been, and it certainly is in the best tradition of political rhetoric to try to incorporate such movements into the national self-understanding, however much it might blind us to the difficulties of social change.