Letters to the Editor
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At the risk of raising the ire...
of the commenters here, I would say that we have to understand why this state of affairs has come about - not to apologize for it, but to find ways to make it better.
Congress critters, and Senators especially, are mostly free agents, herds of cats. They can be tugged by the likes of the DCCC and DSCC and activist groups, but by and large, incumbents are secure and have their own war chests. Doubly problematic for the Democrats, lacking a President, there is no highly visible party leader setting the agenda. Contrast this with Parliamentary democracies, where the out-of-power party has a shadow cabinet and a shadow Prime Minister.
And, face it, Members of Congress have outsized egos and connect their personal self-esteem to their office. The prospect of losing raises huge anxiety that is partly, to them, existential. Fear comes when you cannot rely on your colleague to cover your backside. That's what keeps the conventional wisdom and the commonly-held boundaries of discourse in place.
That's why the House Dems lose proportionately fewer "blue dogs" and the like on votes than the Senate, where the spotlight is greater and the average tenure is decades.
So how to fix the situation? A Democratic President will be a huge, huge step. He or she will be the one on TV news every night, quoted on Page A1 right column, and will set the agenda. Congressional Democrats will then be constrained to make modifications at the edges, rather than going off on their own tangents. If the Democratic Presidential nominee campaigns hard on asking the people to elect a Democratic Congress - not just the candidate from the campaign stop's local district - so as to make bold change with him or her (I can't remember when that last happened), there is a chance that good will can bind both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue at least long enough to make significant qualitative changes that are long overdue.
The next president can be a great one, precisely because they will be faced with enormous inherited problems. I do fear - I guess echoing the author - that the lesser spirits of just winning, settling for half a loaf, can blow an historic opportunity in 2008.