Two thousand, five hundred and forty-one days -- that's my back-of-napkin calculation of the number of days that transpired from the night Two thousand, five hundred and forty-one days -- that's my back-of-napkin calculation of the number of days that transpired from the night Al Gore conceded the 2000 election (December 13, 2000) to Wednesday night's Republican debate. Two weeks shy of seven full years, thus ends the "Democrats don't know what they stand for" era. While it is true that national Democrats -- who are meeting today and tomorrow in northern Virginia -- haven't quite developed an affirmative message beyond "we're not those Republicans who ruined the country," as of Wednesday the GOP is officially the party that owns the "doesn't know what it stands for" label. I won't recapitulate the disputes and disagreements on every issue from Wednesday night's fracas; plenty of good stuff has already been said here on TAPPED by Addie, Dana, and Paul. And I recognize that the current pool of GOP presidential candidates does not map the Republican electorate perfectly. But they are fair enough sampling to conclude that there is an utter lack of consistency in the party once one strips away convenient and increasing empty platitudes like "being for a strong defense" or "supporting fiscal responsibility." And the dissensus was not only revealed by "gotcha" questions on Biblical literalism or What-Would-Jesus-Do about capital punishment. No: On education, abortion, health care, immigration, Iraq and even taxes, this is a party in ideological and identity turmoil. Lo these past seven years, countless articles and books included some version of "The Democrats are in disarray" line; that sentence, verbatim, is in fact the very first of my own book, which I began writing in early 2005 at the height of that era. If any doubt remained as recently as twilight Wednesday, that period has passed and today is Day Three of a new era of partisan disarray. --Tom Schaller
