State Of The Democratic Party

by Tony Blankley - February 2, 2006 - The Washington Times

As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn't have any solutions to today's dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self.

The Democrats' wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.

If one recalls, last year the official position of the Democratic Party was not only that they opposed President Bush's Social Security reform. They also argued there was no crisis — no major problem that required rectification.

(In fact Social Security has four trillion dollars of unfunded liability, and if major changes are not made quickly, will only be able to pay the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised benefits.)

The only problem with this situation is that for the vast majority of people who really care about this, they do not want to believe that someone else will not be taxed to fix it. The American citizen who needs social security will not accept the money will not be there. The American citizen who does not need social security wants no change as they are sure "change" will simply be higher taxes on them now.

There is thus a powerful political constituency for the status quo and kicking the problem down the road. Bush ran into this when he tried to fix the problem. Rather than getting credit for any solution, he got resentment that he made people think about the problem.

However the real frustration is that when the problem becomes reality down the road, democrats are sure they can blame it on Republicans. The writer of this article, Tony Blankley, does not think a rational person would accept this. He sees that it is a problem with the politics being played by the democratic party. However the democrats believe that they will not be held responsible for what they have done. It will be "interesting" to see who is right. Yes. That is definitely the right word. "Interesting".