Democrats as opposition party

Like on most blogs, my posting will be lighter than usual over the next week or so.  But I do expect to be posting some things.

James Wolcott asks a good question.  And, it seems to me, in an entirely appropriate tone, in Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye 12/13/04:

I'm glad the press is having a dance party with [the Bernard Kerik story], because God knows the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel. I just saw a segment on MSNBC (which has been all over the Kerik story today, bless Rick Kaplan's cyborg heart) pitting a Republican strategist against a Democratic one, and the Democratic spokesman--who goes by the name of Michael Brown--seemed to have washed down his weeny pills with warm Ovaltine. Instead of kicking Kerik and Giuliana between the uprights for three points, Brown fretted that vetting process for cabinet candidates was "going to far," and that we were in danger of discouraging people from public service. Oh no, we wouldn't want to discourage philandering, pocket-lining, deadbeat no-show bully-boys like Bernard Kerik from having the opportunity to muck around with our civil liberties in the name of "national security" and hold bigshot press conferences. I mean, if that sort of thing were to continue happening, people might start mistaking the Democrats for an opposition party and thinking that the press has an adversarial role to play, and we don't want that to happen, it might actually lead to signs of life in that mausoleum we call the nation's capital.

Both of New York's Democratic Senators, including the woman who for many is the great liberal hope, Hillary Clinton, cheerfully endorsed Kerik's nomination for the Department of Homeland Security.  And yet the guy was brimming with so many problems that even our Potemkin press corps finally noticed!

The Democrats need to be acting like an opposition party and a party representing the people now.  Bush has used the time between the election and the Christmas break to promote the dismantling of Social Security, escalate the war in Iraq, propose a national security team that will be even more lockstep in support of the preventive war strategy, start a propaganda campaign for war with Iran and promote a new round of tax cuts for the wealthiest.  The Democrats have been astonishingly passive while all of this was going on.  They need to wake up and fight.

The Democrats really have to do a better job than they did the last four years at being an active opposition party.  They have to make a serious fact over this Social Security phase-out, and they need to debunk this "Social Security is in crisis" lie before it becomes too deeply embedded in the conventional wisdom.  Our Potemkin press corps is just too lazy and compromised to report on this aggressively on their own.  The Democrats have to give them a "this side says/the other side says" story for them to look at the Republicans' false claims on this.

Josh Marshall has the right idea on pressing for serious party unity on this:  On Social Security 12/19/04 and this additional post from 12/19/04.