It’s hard to believe that the 2006 Congressional elections are just seven months away, but then again, it still feels like 2004 was just a few weeks ago. I’m currently working on narrowing the list of candidates/organizations I will donate/steer money to, an exercise that could easily be rendered moot by the continued incompetence of Democratic leaders. Even as the President’s approval is tanking and Americans express a strong preference for a change in Congressional control, Democrats are still ignoring James Carville‘s indispensable maxim:

“When your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil.”

In the past month, two Democrats have gone out of their way to buck their leadership:

Senator Russ Feingold introduced a resolution censuring the President for authorizing warrant-less domestic spying. Despite the fact that the President has admitted that he ignored the Constitution and the 1978 FISA law in authorizing the NSA to spy on domestic communications, Feingold’s colleagues are running away from the media, a wholly unnatural act for U.S. Senators.

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, capitalizing on an election-year gift courtesy of the corrupt majority, compiled a report on Republican transgressions only to see it removed from the internet by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in the wake of criticism from the very politicians targeted in the report.

Rather than allowing the Democratic rank-and-file to launch their anvils, the leadership has adopted a policy that amounts to sticking their heads in the sand and hoping that the President and his Republican allies are unable to reverse their free fall. Hope, it seems, is a plan if you happen to be responsible for restoring Democratic majorities in Washington. With all of this top-down brilliance, it’s no surprise that you can’t throw a virtual rock without hitting a liberal blogger who thinks that he/she could do a better job than the professional pollsters, consultants and elected officials charged with winning the November elections. They might be right.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker, raises an interesting point:

Bill Simmons: While we’re on the subject of the Knicks, please enlighten the readers on your convoluted theory about why Isiah Thomas is a terrible GM, because he’s one of my favorites.

Gladwell: Here’s the real question. If I was GM of the Knicks, would I be doing a better job of managing the team than Thomas? I believe, somewhat immodestly, that the answer is yes. And I say this even though it is abundantly clear that Thomas knows several thousand times more about basketball than I do*.
[...]
I know nothing about basketball, so I’d make only the safest, most obvious decisions.
[...]
Would I have made the disastrous [Stephon] Marbury trade? Of course not. I’d wonder why Jerry Colangelo — who I know is a lot smarter than I am — was so willing to part with him.

Would I have traded for [Eddy] Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball — and about Eddy Curry — than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player’s potential. But I’d look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that’s he’s been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I’d tell his agent to take a hike.
[...]
…just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can’t miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today — as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan. The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement. That’s Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players.

The rules of politics are in some cases very simple. When one of your opponents has an approval in the low 30s and you lead your other opponents by 15 points, you go for the jugular. It doesn’t take a lot of political experience to come to that conclusion, just as it doesn’t take a professional gambler to know that doubling down on a 10 when the dealer shows 2 through 9 is the right play in blackjack. Pass up either opportunity and you increase the advantage your opponent already enjoys. By letting Republicans off the hook for their thieving, duplicitous actions, Democrats are not only helping their opponents – they are hurting themselves.

As Democratic voters (and increasing numbers of independents) look to their leaders to stand up to the corruption and damaging policies of the last five years, they see inaction and hear silence. No one is asking Congressional Democrats to oppose for the sake of opposing, but people are begging for them to stand up for our principles. Instead, they are starting from the middle ground and watching their positions get averaged into the agenda of the radical right on issues from abortion to taxes to the Supreme Court to the social safety net. If the President won’t “negotiate with myself,” why should we?

Consider the only real victory the Democrats have to show for their last five years of work: defeating the Republican attempt to privatize Social Security. At every turn, they rolled out statistics to rebut the nonsensical scare tactics employed by the right and resoundingly defeated a just-reelected President flush with “political capital” he was determined to spend destroying the 70-year-old backbone of the social safety net. Not only did the Democrats beat the President and stave off the attempt to put retirement at risk for many Americans, they showed their base that they stood for something. This stand paid dividends in off-year elections including huge wins in Governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey. Could it be that their lack of fight since then has contributed to the malaise that held down turnout in high profile primaries this year in Illinois and Texas and threatens to do the same in November?

Democrats have been in the minority in the House for almost 12 years straight, and most of that time in the Senate as well. They lost a Presidential election between a sitting Vice President and a functional illiterate, and another between a sitting Senator and a President who for most of the race had poll numbers below 50%. A corporation with a record like that would find themselves out of business or facing a shareholder revolt. How many more losses will it take before the Democratic decision makers realize that their instincts might be off by a little bit? How long before people who denounced Ralph Nader for trying to split the party start splitting themselves?

The answers to these questions remain elusive, but the fact remains: the people in charge simply aren’t as smart as they think they are, and no amount of losing has yet made that clear to them. They’re still giving contracts to players who are clearly overmatched, still standing when they should be doubling, and still betting on long shot strategies when a sure thing is sitting in their laps.

*In no way whatsoever am I granting that Nancy Pelosi knows several thousand times more about politics than I do.