Frank Rich writes in today's New York Times:
Right now the capital is entranced by a fictional story line about the Democrats. As this narrative goes, the party’s sweep of Congress was more or less an accident. The victory had little to do with the Democrats’ actual beliefs and was instead solely the result of President Bush’s unpopularity and a cunning backroom stunt by the campaign Machiavellis, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, to enlist a smattering of “conservative” candidates to run in red states. In this retelling of the 2006 election, the signature race took place in Montana, where the victor was a gun-toting farmer with a flattop haircut: i.e., a Democrat in Republican drag. And now the party is deeply divided as its old liberals and new conservatives converge on Capitol Hill to slug it out.
The only problem with this version of events is that it’s not true.
Okay. I believe that the Democrats are divided in what I see as a very healthy way. Well, healthy as long as the progressives take charge.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are also divided. Or rather, fragmented and in disarray. The Republican who crossed over and voted for -- if not Democrats then un-Republicans -- are the Republicans who agree with progressives that the center too far to the right. Frankly, the "centrist" sector of the Democratic Party has also moved too far to the right. It has become establishmentarian, authoritarian, and disconnected from reality to about the same extent as the right in the Republican Party.
That's why it's important that progressives take the lead on the left and -- sorry fellas -- put out the lights of Emanuel and Schumer.
Frank Rich also believes the Republican divisions are key. But he makes quite another point.
Most of all, disengagement from Iraq is the patriotic thing to do. Diverting as “divided Democrats” has been, it’s escapist entertainment. The Washington story that will matter most going forward is the fate of the divided Republicans. Only if they heroically come together can the country be saved from a president who, for all his professed pipe dreams about democracy in the Middle East, refuses to surrender to democracy’s verdict at home.
We'll see. Meanwhile, it would make sense to discard the fiction that this is a two-party country. Anyone can discern at least five discrete political coalitions in America. We'd do better to think in terms of "multi" rather than "bi".
