Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Despite driving up Bush's negatives, Democrats still have structural problems

E.J. Dionne:

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But the party's problems are structural and can be explained by three numbers: 21, 34, and 45. According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate.

Those numbers mean that liberal-leaning Democrats are far more dependent than conservatively inclined Republicans on alliances with the political center. Democrats second-guess themselves because they have to.

Consider that in 2004, Democrat John Kerry won 85 percent of the liberal vote and defeated Bush by a healthy 54 percent to 45 percent among moderates. But Bush prevailed because he won 84 percent of a conservative vote that constitutes more than a third of the electorate.

Or consider the lay of the land for the 2006 congressional elections. It takes 218 seats to form a majority in the House of Representatives. Kerry carried only 180 congressional districts, according to the Almanac of American Politics. Put another way, Democrats, according to the Almanac, now hold and have to defend 41 House districts that Bush carried. Republicans are defending only 18 districts that Kerry carried.

The core difficulty for Democrats is that they must solve two problems simultaneously — and solving one problem can get in the way of solving the other. Over time, Democrats need to reduce the conservative advantage over liberals in the electorate, which means the party needs to take clear stands that could detach voters from their allegiance to conservatism. For some in the party, this means becoming more moderate on cultural issues such as abortion. For others, it means full-throated populism to attract lower-income social conservatives. Some favor a combination of the two, while still others worry that too much populism would drive away moderate voters in the upper middle class. The debate often leads to intellectual gridlock.

Besides the structural problems, the liberals that are loudest are usually seen between the scarry and kookie scale by the real world. Some of their voices break out into the mainstream, like Paul Krugman, but they are still seen as kookie by most people. For those with the stomach, all it takes is an occissional reading of the Daily Kos or Democrat underground to see just how far out of the mainstream most of these liberals are and why they cannot attract middle America.

They have put themselves in the same death spiral that many radical groups do. As their failure and frustration mounts they convince themsleves that they have not been liberal enough or Islamic enough or what ever their true believer group might be. They redouble their efforts at being more "pure" which further drives away the center.

The Daily Kos has on various occassions threatened to destroy centerist Democrats. For a group that only appeals to about 20 percent of the country, that is not a winning strategy. But when you read the muck that comes from these sites it is not about persuasion, it is about insults and assumptions of venality on the part of those who hold a different point of view.