The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.Back in the day, this observation by an obscure Italian radical named Antonio Gramsci was oft-quoted. His words, written in the 1920s from an Italian prison cell, have great resonance again.
The Iraq War is obviously both a disaster and a fraud, but what different future for American policy and the Iraqi people might be imagined and brokered politically?
President Bush has lost control of his domestic agenda. Republican moderates have revolted, for the second time in two weeks, against Bush's policies of enacting deeper tax cuts for the wealthy while taking billions out of social programs. Deadlock ensues.
High Court nominee Samuel Alito's record is daily revealed to be ever further outside the mainstream, and but will Republican moderates recoil when it comes time to vote?
The Bush era is dying a well-deserved demise. But what future is struggling to be born?
The Democrats are still the minority party in Congress, and only beginning to function as a coherent opposition. Democrats split 22-22 in the Senate on the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Alito nomination, to the swing seat held by Sandra Day O'Connor, has much higher stakes. But Democrats have not yet decided whether to mount a filibuster.
Belatedly, leading Democratic hawks are now openly saying that that the war was a mistake. This week, Congressman John Murtha, a leading Democratic hawk and Vietnam combat veteran who helped give Bush's war bipartisan credibility, startled official Washington by calling for a complete U.S. pullout in six months. Former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards called his vote for war a mistake. Public opinion has turned overwhelmingly against Bush's war.
Ordinarily, a meltdown by the governing party would lead a resurgent opposition to make big gains in the next off-year election. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the Republican leader in the House, effectively nationalized the off-year election with his so-called Contract with America.
Gingrich took advantage of the fact that President Clinton had been weakened by his losing battle for national health insurance and his Pyrrhic victory to win enactment of NAFTA, in which he split his own party and worked mostly with Republicans. Republicans, benefiting from ideological unity and discipline, picked up 54 seats and took control of the House.
Can the Democrats to the same to the badly weakened Republicans in 2006? In many respects, the 2006 off-year elections ought to be a referendum on Bush. By voting for a Republican congressman or senator, citizens vote for Republican organization of Congress, and support for Bush policies.
Ordinarily, a big swing in public opinion would translate into a shift in control of Congress. However, in the House two decades of gerrymandering have made large swings much less likely. In the nine House elections between 1968 and 1984, the median partisan shift of House seats was 42. But in elections since 1984, the only time the opposition party gained 26 seats or more was in the Gingrich landslide of 1994.
Democrats need a net pick-up of only 15 House seats in 2006 to win back a majority. But because of gerrymandering, only about 30 races are expected to be close. Barring a total blowout that puts more Republican seats at risk, Democrats would have to win most contestable races.
Over in the Senate, the steady loss of once safe Southern Democratic seats has created a Republican majority of 55-44-1. Next year, six or seven Democratic Senate seats are considered to be at risk, and six or seven Republican ones are at risk. Here again, to win a net pickup of six seats and control of the Senate, Democrats would need to hold nearly all of their own seats, and pick up nearly every winnable Republican one.
To grasp the partisan structural tilt, consider this. In the three elections since 2000, millions more people voted for Democratic legislators than Republican ones, but Republicans control Congress. Bush won 51 percent of the vote, but 59 percent of congressional districts. Some of this anomaly reflects deliberate recent gerrymandering; some of it reflects the original gerrymandering of the Constitution, which gave small states the same number of Senate seats as large states.
So, while the Bush administration continues to collapse and lose the confidence of voters, it may be a while before we get a viable alternative. A morbid interregnum indeed.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared in the Boston Globe.
