Dionne looks for an answer

E.J. Dionne attempts to offer the Democrats advice on their perennial problem---party discipline. I am aware of the difficulties first-hand because in the not-so-recent-past I worked at what the Dems called a "troubleshooter" in several states where the party's internecine strife was hurting its performance. John Podesta, now in the exalted position as head of the Center for American Progress, used to work for me in these long-ago forays into the maelstrom of clashing egos.

But I digress. Dionne is always sensible and witty, but today overlooks a serious problem the Democrats refuse to admit they have:

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show how their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward the alternative program they will owe the voters in the presidential year of 2008.

This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, "Bush hatred") as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of "American Idol" love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.

The problem is that Dionne falls into the same mental fallacy that CNN correspondents recently did when they complained, along with Bill Plante of CBS News, that the White House made the WH Press Corps "look foolish" after the uproar about Cheney's accident.

The American Public looks at the White House Press Corps making fools OF THEMSELVES. Scott McClellan merely provides them the space, as in the old science of ju-jitsu, to have their histrionic theatrics and unruly and impolite behavior get broadcast nationwide. Their behavior makes them look foolish, not the White House.

The Democrats and their allies in the MSM suffer from a lack of accountability for their personal actions----although Kathryn Seelye's recent NYT column shows they are aware of their mental disorder because they all, herd-like to a fault, appear to use the same shrink to diagnose their mental problems.

But the "helping professions" cannot remove what the public sees again and again from the "angry" left---personality and character disorders they attempt to mask by the sobriquet of "passion."

The Democratic blogs' responding to Dionne say that the recipe for a Democratic victory in 2006 and 2008 lies in more "anger."

The "angry left" only confirms most American adults' suspicion that the hard left suffers from what the American Thinker calls "mass psychosis." And the soft left is being encouraged to join that delusion that more heat will produce more light. This entire cast of mind is a throwback to the tactics and strategy of the Communist-left and Fascist-Right of pre-WWII Europe, calling for agitation and propaganda, agitprop in a word.

What the Democrats need now is more light and less heat, or they will continue in their "angry" mode for two more years.