The Democrats Aren't Ready to Lead

Or at least so says Tony Blankley. In his latest column, Blankley concedes that there are reasons to doubt the wisdom and competence of our Republican ruling party, but argues that the Democrats are not yet ready to assume the awesome responsibility that comes with running Congress. He writes:

[A]s so often, guidance can be found in the advice of the master of deductive reasoning, Sherlock Holmes, who once explained to Dr. Watson: "It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital."

And for the American voters today, the first vital fact is the nature and state of the opposition party that aspires to replace the existing majority. Rarely in the annals of American politics has an opposition party been less well prepared for governance than today's congressional Democratic Party. They have not used their decade in the wilderness constructively.

My first thought upon reading this was: how prepared do you really need to be to run Congress? What does it mean to be "prepared for governance"? My hunch is that if the Republican majority was replaced overnight by a bunch of chimpanzees, the effectiveness of Congress wouldn't be noticeably diminished (it might even improve).

More importantly, though, does Blankley really think this is good deductive logic? Our current Congress is perhaps the most corrupt and dysfunctional of all time. Its members are being indicted right and left. It has conducted absolutely no oversight for the last six years. When it is not rubberstamping White House bills, it is allowing industry lobbyists free reign to draft legislation. In other words, the people currently manning the helm are so manifestly corrupt and incompetent that it is absurd to be questioning the qualifications of the other side.

I can just imagine Blankley sitting on a plane being piloted by a five year old with no flying experience. The plane is heading straight for a mountain. A retired airline pilot offers to take over the helm. Blankley says "not so fast, buddy; how do we know you're prepared to fly this plane"?

Okay, maybe that's not a fair analogy. Maybe the kid should be 7 years old.

Seriously, though, you get my point: logic requires that you choose the best of the options available. It makes no sense to look at the Democratic party in a vacuum, as Blankely would have us do. He writes:

The first responsibility of an opposition party seeking governance is to be reasonably well organized and led. But no credible leaders have emerged amongst the congressional Democrats. There remains a vicious struggle between Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer. Indeed, it is widely believed that she put up the aging John Murtha to run against Hoyer for the second leadership spot next January.

Oh please. Our system of government wasn't even intended to have political parties. Are we really supposed to believe it is somehow dangerous or ill-advised to have Congress controlled by a party that is not "reasonably well organized and led"? Is that really a prerequisite for voting for one candidate over another? Keep in mind that the current Republican leadership is embroiled in a massive scandal and all the major players are pointing their fingers at each other. Nothing on the Democratic side even remotely approaches that level of dysfunction, so by Blankley's own bizarre logic, we should still be voting Democratic. He writes:

Newt Gingrich's Republicans (of which I was a proud lieutenant) went to the public in 1994 with a unified leadership, a deeply substantive agenda -- including not just slogans but 10 major pieces of legislation fully drafted so the public could judge where the Republicans were planning to lead.

This is pure revisionist nonsense. Up until the Republicans actually managed to win the 1994 election, Gingrich was universally considered to be a clown and a liability to his party. Pundits suggested that people might be afraid to vote Republican for fear of making Gingrich Speaker of the House. And the Contract with America, which was only unveiled a few weeks before the election, did not have anywhere close to the impact that pundits like Blankley now claim it did.

Nancy Pelosi is no JFK, but she can more than hold her own when compared to a clown like Gingrich. And there are easily 10 pieces of ready-made legislation that the Democrats already agree on.

This entire argument, that the Democrats are not ready to lead, just smacks of desperation. It's only been 12 years since the Democrats last ran the House, and only four since they ran the Senate. I'm pretty sure they remember how to ride that bicycle. And they'd have to try really hard to do as bad a job as the current majority.