Did Losing Help the Dems?

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Democratic Party

Should the floridly psychotic be able to buy, conceal, and carry automatic weapons into shopping malls and college campuses? If so, would it be better if they had to stop and reload before firing thirty rounds?

Should the federal government roll back unemployment benefits, health care coverage for the underinsured, job creation efforts, and infrastructure projects in the midst of a massive recession?

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Should we give away billions in tax breaks to multinational corporations that make and sell their products overseas?

These don't seem like hard questions. But the Democrats have struggled to come up with clear answers.

The fog may be lifting, however. After their drubbing in the midterm elections, losing sixty-three seats and their majority in the House, the Democrats are back at work as a more progressive minority.

The midterm results were bad news for the party as a whole, and a brush-back to President Obama. But there may be hope for a stronger, more unified left.

The conservative Blue Dogs, who tied up debate on health care and torpedoed the public option, lost more than half their members in November-cutting their caucus from fifty-four members to twenty-six. That means they can no longer control Democratic debate. The Progressive Caucus, which has eighty-odd members, by contrast, lost only three incumbents but gained a couple new members. And the nine freshmen Democrats in the House (the smallest new class in nearly a century) are by and large quite progressive.

They include four women and five African Americans. Terri Sewell, the first black woman elected to Congress from Alabama, former speaker of the California assembly Karen Bass, and Frederica Wilson, the representative from Florida who petitioned John Boehner to allow her to wear her trademark fabulous hats on the House floor, are all for gun control and abortion rights, and they get high marks from labor and civil liberties groups. Among the nine, every single representative who has been rated by the NRA gets an "F"-except for David Cicilline, the first openly gay mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who gets an "F-."

C ontrary to Beltway wisdom that the Democrats should give ground on important issues and move closer to the Republicans, Progressive Change Campaign Committee leader Stephanie Taylor draws the opposite conclusion from the 2010 election results: "Democrats lost because they didn't fight strongly enough for popular progressive change--like a public...