Why the Democrats Can't Govern

That's the title of a piece by liberal Jonathan Chait

The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him.

At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama’s case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same: Democrats in Congress, and especially the Senate. At a time when the country desperately needs a coherent response to the array of challenges it faces, the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege. Obama has made mistakes, as did his predecessors. Yet the constant recurrence of legislative squabbling and drift suggests a deeper problem than any characterological or tactical failures by these presidents: a congressional party that is congenitally unable to govern.

George W. Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, with only 50 Republicans in the Senate. After his disputed election, pundits insisted Bush would have to scale back his proposed massive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items. Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline.

Number one - Republican are just better at national governance than are Democrats. That's been proved over and over.

Secondly, however, is the makeup of the parties themselves. Republicans do not have as many little factions with goals and objectives at odds with other factions within the party. Consequently, on the big stuff they tend to be able to hang together and show discipline.

Democrats are a party of special interest groups. You have the big government liberals, the gays, the pro-abortion bunch, the Affirmative Action and racial politics crowd...just to name a few...and to keep it all interesting, the House has a crop of Blue Dog conservative Dems who will lose their seats if they vote for everything the other groups want. That makes it tough to maintain any kind of party discipline no matter what the Dem president wants.

2010 could end up looking a lot like 1994 if Obama doesn't get his act together and get the congressional Dems under control. My guess is he won't be able to do it.