Democrats: Is the progressive era already over?

“You know the ship is in serious trouble when even the rats start jumping into the frothy abyss,” said Charles Hurt in the New York Post. That pretty much describes the state of affairs for congressional Democrats, after two embattled Democratic senators, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, announced last week that they would retire rather than face angry voters in November. But that’s only the latest evidence that President Obama and the Democrats “have blown through more political goodwill in one year than most parties do in a decade.” With midterm elections still 10 months away, 13 congressional Democrats have now called it quits, and polls suggest that Democrats will lose seats in both chambers, putting their majority at risk. So much for the “permanent progressive majority” w e supposedly elected 14 months ago, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. That filibuster-proof, 60-vote Democratic bloc in the Senate is looking more and more like a “fleeting historical accident.”

Sorry, liberals, but the pendulum is swinging, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Democrats took over Congress and the White House in 2008 mainly because George W. Bush’s “big-government conservatism” failed and the economy cratered. But voters who bought Obama’s promise of “change” have been shocked by the Democrats’ unprecedented levels of deficit spending, the $787 billion failed “stimulus” plan, and the health-care reform mess. By a nearly two-to-one margin, Americans say the country is on “the wrong track.” Independent voters, who handed the 2008 election to Obama, are abandoning the Democrats in droves. Indeed, the “anti-tax, pro–limited government Tea Party movement” now has a 41 percent approval rating, higher than either the GOP or the Democrats.

You’re forgetting the Democrats’ secret weapon, said Bruce Reed in Slate.com. I’m referring, of course, to the Republican Party. The “party of no” may be energizing its base by opposing Obama on health care, energy, and virtually everything else, but the GOP offers no coherent agenda. Don’t forget how small the Republican base is, said Ramesh Ponnuru in Time.com. Even after the Democrats’ terrible year, only 26 percent of voters identify themselves as Republicans. The party itself is bitterly divided between doctrinaire conservatives and pragmatic centrists, and poorly led by gaffe-prone GOP Chairman Michael Steele, who last week said that his party was not “ready” to lead, and “was not going to win back Congress this November.”

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What happens in November will be largely determined by the economy, said John Nichols in The Nation. Obama and the Democrats have made a critical mistake, by devoting most of their energy to health-care policy, Afghanistan, and homeland security, which obviously are “serious matters.” But with unemployment holding steady at 10 percent—17 percent if you count those who have given up even looking for work—millions are in desperate straits, and millions more are deeply worried about their futures. Unemployment “is the single greatest threat” to the Democrats’ hold on power, and if they don’t offer some effective solutions fast, they are in “for the rudest of all political awakenings.”