Democrats Eating Their Old

The party that prides itself on being a big tent for diversity is showing signs of cannibalism since it took over Congress a year ago and, in a reversal of eating its young, is threatening to devour some of its long-standing stalwarts.

After all the furor about anti-war legislators not being anti-war enough, now we have Rep. Barney Frank, of all people, defending himself from charges of not being pro-gay enough by backing a bill to protect homosexual men and women in the workplace that might leave transsexuals vulnerable.

“There is a tendency in American politics,” he said yesterday, “for the people who feel most passionately about... a single issue to be unrealistic in what a democratic political system can deliver, and that can be self-defeating.”

In an era when George Bush is still blocking almost everything with his veto power and remnants of a monolithic Republican minority, Democratic activists only play into his hands by forgetting that politics is the art of the possible and that the perfect can be the worst enemy of the good enough.

Push for perfection by all means, but don’t trample those who are out front navigating the minefields.

Incremental improvement in energy standards and cutbacks of farm subsidies are not very exciting for generations that want it all now. But politics has never been the best place for instant gratification, except for those who exercise their mouths rather than real power.

From half a century of observation and activism emerges the lesson that inertia, while it slows progress, can also be the best protection against violent, destructive change.

Those who find that old fogeyism can eat me, too.

Republicans' Pity Party

The Bush Administration keeps recalling the cliché about the kid who kills his parents and pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

Now Republicans are retiring in droves and bewailing the vicissitudes that have made their legislative lives unbearable.

Today’s Washington Post reports “moderate Republicans in Congress are facing a tough choice: Stand by President Bush or run for their political lives. Votes are due soon on Iraq, an expansion of a children's health insurance program and an array of spending bills. GOP leaders hope to use them to regain credibility with their base voters as a party for strong defense and fiscal discipline. But moderates, many of them facing the possibility of difficult reelection bids next year, are dreading the expected showdowns.”

It would be easier to sympathize with those Republican moderates if they hadn’t handed over the keys to their home to Newt Gingrich in 1994 and stood by while George W. Bush has been burning it down for the past six years.

Emblematic of their experience is the recent decision of Lincoln Chafee, a second-generation product of what used to be respectable Republicanism, to leave the party that sent him to the Senate but then turned its back on him over his positions on abortion and gay rights.

The Democrats who stand to gain by the Republican debacle might want to keep in mind that, despite the horror show of the Bush years, there is no ultimate profit for a party that abandons its core principles.