Conceding Defeat The Old Fashioned Way -- Blaming Someone Else

An in depth article in the New York Times today discusses the prevailing attitudes of Democratic Senators and strategists as they contemplate the successful performance of Samuel Alito before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said that the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

These are both epiphanistic realizations akin to a second grader figuring out how a math table works. This is what national elections are all about, and befuddled democrats are finally putting two and two together--almost.

Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.

Most people I talk with are already tired of left leaning jurists issuing "out of the mainstream" opinions--and they see Alito as antithesis to these opinions. What is out of the mainstream to most of the people I talk to is the idea of the Pledge being declared unconstitutional, that the constitution contains an explicit right for gay marriage, that a public display of the Ten Commandments represents the establishment of a national religion, and that the government has the right to seize personal property to grant that property to another private entity. Sure, abortion is also a push-button issue, but it really doesn't help democrats that their most visible party members are adamant about protecting the free enterprise of abortionists to suck the brains out of viable babies after their feet are already out of the womb.

But daftness, it seems, is hard to understand for the daft.

Several Democrats expressed frustration over what they saw as the Republicans outmaneuvering them by drawing attention to an episode Wednesday when Judge Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, began crying as her husband was being questioned. That evening, senior Democratic senate aides convened in a basement room of the Dirksen Senate Office Building stunned at the realization that the pictures of a weeping Mrs. Alito were being broadcast across the nation - as opposed to, for example, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressing Judge Alito about his membership in an alumni club that resisted affirmative action efforts.

"Had she not cried, we would have won that day," said one Senate strategist involved in the hearings, who did not want to be quoted by name discussing the Democrats' problems at the hearing. "It got front-page attention. It was on every local news show."

No, you still don't quite get it, and you weren't "winning the day," what you were doing was exposing yourself publicly for the mean and manipulative bastards that you are. No one gives a rat's ass about an inactive membership Alito had in his life 20 years ago, when they know that all the attention paid to it was pointless grandstanding.

Truly, if democrats want to become more relevant in deciding the slant of the judiciary in the future they are going to have to relate more favorably to values and ideals that most Americans hold dear. Not by attaching themselves to the hip of serving judges that outrage Americans, in other words, modify your stance to one more centrist in nature and build some voting momentum.

Indeed, many Democrats said that what took place with both the Roberts and Alito nominations simply underlined what Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democratic who ran for president in 2004, said would happen to the court if Mr. Bush was returned to the White House.

"George Bush won the election," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat. "If you don't like it, you better win elections."

Indeed Mr. Emanuel. Now go tell that to the rest of your party.

All emphasis mine.