Susan Estrich is very unhappy that apparently nothing stands between the Democrats and their desires right now:
Imagine how different things might be right now if there were a Republican Party. I mean a party like the one led by Ronald Reagan, George Bush or Newt Gingrich; a party with a program, a single set of talking points, and the technological and communications advantages to get their message across. That kind of Republican Party. The kind that doesn’t exist right now.
…which is particularly funny, given that she’s been actively trying to put the Democratic party in this position for the last decade or so. Not that this was exactly what she wanted: what she wanted was probably more like the 110th Congress, only with a Democratic President. That way those awful Republicans would still be in a position to block the Democrats’ worst enthusiasms, while still gnashing their teeth over all that legislation being sent over by the White House. Put another way, she clearly still wants anything besides the Democratic party to take the blame for the current mess; alas for her, if 2008 demonstrated nothing else it demonstrated that the Republican party is not in charge. And it’s been remarkably united in refusing to take on responsibility without also taking on an equal amount of power.
As for vacuums… nature abhors them, and what Estrich is “complaining*” about is a self-correcting feature. What’s confusing her on that point is probably that ‘populist’ movements on the Left are exclusively a top-down affair these days (the recent CWFP embarrassment is a pretty good example of same): artificially creating a popular response to a perceived outrage pretty much requires that somebody organize the community from the start to get the desired response. The concept that the true leaders of a movement would naturally come from the movement themselves is just too tainted with free market thinking for our academic and pundit classes… which causes them to discount societal trends that are not being shepherded from the start. Essentially, everybody’s looking in the wrong place.
No, not “everybody except me is looking in the wrong place.” I don’t have a clue who the new leaders of the Republican party for the 2010 elections are going to be, either. It’s just that I’m going to wait a bit until it actually becomes steam engine time
Moe Lane
*Scare quotes because if the economic situation resolved itself tomorrow she’d jump up and down for joy at our supposed destruction. She’s only concerned now because she’s afraid, not to mention as pessimistic about the ability of the Democratic Party to fix things as I am.
Crossposted to RedState.