NP: party shuffle

Reading another article on the Alito hearings is making me wonder if there's a different strategy from the Democrats than nearly everyone is talking about.

Put simply -- and this is borne out of Feinstein's comments in the above article -- why does the Democratic party seem to be rolling over on abortion? On the one hand, it seems to go against the grain of everything we've been told the Democrats stand for. On the other, never underestimate the power of the best offense being a good defense in politics.

Because, at the end of the day, this has to be about the 2006 and 2008 elections. To the Democrats, winning in those elections is more important than protecting the right to an abortion at the federal level. It pretty much has to be that simple. If they block Alito with a filibuster, the stink of being obstructionist will pervade as long as the GOP machine can keep the media talking about it. And as long as the root of that obstruction is abortion, the talking point will continue to be the "Democrats kill babies" stick that the Right loves beating the Left over the head with, because it works.

On the other hand, with Alito -- and if I may make a broad aside, the simplest way to make me almost completely discredit your opinion is to give the other side a stupid perjorative nickname like "ScAlito" or even "BorkAlito" -- on the Supreme Court, I think the Democrats will secretly be wishing for their worst fears to come to past, because what the GOP continually overestimates is the subservience and general stupidity of the American people. They still think they can get away with all the nasty things they've been, well, getting away with. But that's starting to change, and if the new court makes things worse, it'll change faster. If that accelleration is enough to change the conventional wisdom on how many seats the Democrats can take in '06, then bigger things start changing.

So -- and I'll admit this may be giving the Dems way too much credit -- the emerging reluctance to make Alito the big fight could just be political rope-a-dope, as it could give the Bush White House the sort of false confidence it got from the last election, and another Social Security-esque stupendous backfire on top of existing missteps like Katrina and the NSA story, along with the continuing morass of the Iraq war could set the stage for a pretty monumental collapse.

Whether it's an effective strategy is another matter altogether, as we saw with the resolution to use force in Iraq. Many Democrats cast their vote with the president there with an obvious eye to getting re-elected, and they got rolled hard. Have they learned from that mistake, or are they just repeating it? We'll have to wait and see.