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We will be updating this discussion with additional commentary throughout the day. Scroll down to read Kathryn Jean Lopez, Donna Brazile, Dan Schnur, Glenn Greenwald, Theda Skocpol, Norman Ornstein and Julian Zelizer in the forum.

In the Opinion section Brooks and Collins: What the Results in Massachusetts Mean

The finger-pointing over the loss of the Senate seat in Massachusetts raises a perennial question in American politics: why do the Democrats always seem to be in disarray even when they control the White House, the Senate and the House? Why are the Republicans so much better at checking the power of the majority? Is this difference a matter of political discipline or is it rooted in the ideologies of the parties?





Update | 4 p.m.

A Wake-Up Call

Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor at large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Here, the last year stands in stark contrast to the first year of the George W. Bush administration. And not in a good way.

It’s not disarray among the Democrats that you’re seeing, it’s a stubborn insistence on legislation that is untenable.

George W. Bush ran in 2000 priding himself on his ability to work with the other side of the aisle. And while it all may be lost on the collective conventional memory now, he did just that. His No. 1 priority was No Child Left Behind. And so it was in the Senate — co-sponsored there by Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Flash forward to January 2010. Scott Brown, someone most of us didn’t know a few weeks ago, is taking over the Kennedy seat. Senator-elect Brown is heading to Washington having raised money from across the country, largely on the selling point that he could be the man who hits the reboot button on health care, which just so happens to be President Obama’s top priority.

Read more… We don’t need to get lost in procedural morass. Democrats are facing the likely reality that “Obamacare” goes down, and they have no one to blame but themselves. President Bush had Kennedy on education, President Obama probably could have had an Orrin Hatch on health care. But, instead, he’s opted to be dismissive of just about any and all critics and criticism of his approach. It’s not disarray among the Democrats that you’re seeing on health care, it’s a stubborn insistence on top-down, heavy government control, even when it’s clearly untenable and unpopular. Their governing coalition can’t carry the weight of trying to pass a bill that the American public opposes. Liberal ideologues have called the shots in President Obama’s first year in office. They’re not interested in compromise, and they’re not shy about saying so. President Obama isn’t post-partisan, he’s deeply partisan. Otherwise, an angry August wouldn’t have happened and Scott Brown may not be heading to Washington — with or without his pickup truck.



Update | 2:40 p.m.

Massachusetts Is Our Fault

Donna Brazile is a Democratic political strategist and the Democratic National Committee’s vice chairwoman of voter registration and participation. She is the author of “Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics.”

When I was a little girl, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said, “I don’t belong to an organized party. I’m a Democrat.”

But the nasty partisan atmosphere in the Senate can be blamed on the Republicans.

The strength and weakness of the Democratic Party is in its diversity. Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition of Southern Democrats, laboring men and women and the middle class, the party became a huge tent of every stripe of immigrant, from Plymouth Rock to the present.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is homogeneous. There is some strength in this, in terms of reaching agreements among themselves easily. But there is a real weakness: they represent a narrow spectrum of America.

Read more… A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that bipartisan voting in Congress has plummeted in the last decade. In previous years, some Blue Dog Democrats would break away on very conservative social and fiscal issues, and some Republicans would cross the line on the same issues. But the deliberate partisan atmosphere the Republicans are fostering has become so bad that Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York says senators no longer eat together in the Senate Dinning Room. He recalled recently how you could always find colleagues of both parties there, but that’s no longer the case. Breaking bread together outside of partisan posturing is important to legislative cooperation. According to legend, a fellow Republican once found President Abraham Lincoln having dinner in a hotel restaurant with a Democrat. Confronted, Lincoln responded, “Why, this Democrat is so good natured enough that he can eat out of the same trough with a Republican.” It’s a shame we’ve lost this. As for Massachusetts, that’s our fault. Democrats had a wake up call in Virginia and New Jersey and ignored it. Our attention is now got. Democrats lost a vote. We have not lost our values. We will not lose on health care reform. And we will remain committed to our principles of reforming the economy, reducing the national debt, keeping taxes fair and keeping America safe and secure.



Update | 12:50 p.m.

The Politics of Hunger

Dan Schnur is the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. He was the communications director for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

There’s a natural tendency toward self-flagellation in the Democratic Party, and on days like today it kicks in to an especially high gear. But while Democrats can and should take a long look at themselves after punting away the Kennedy Senate seat this week, the political mishaps that cost them the election in Massachusetts are not endemic to their party in particular. Rather, the tendency to overreach and under-perform reflects the inherent difficulties faced by the majority party, whether that majority is held by Democrats or Republicans.

Whether Democrat or Republican, there’s nothing more motivating than being out of power.

Think of this dynamic as The Politics of Hunger. The longer you and your fellow party members have gone without being invited to a White House state dinner, the hungrier you get. As you get hungry, you become more motivated, you work harder and you become more willing to compromise in order to expand your party membership.

Read more… By contrast, as a party becomes accustomed to majority status, they tend to lose touch with what brought them to power. They take their majority for granted and become less responsive to voters. Worse, they become less open to diversity and dissent. Five years ago, Democrats were so driven to take back Congress that they recruited a cadre of pro-life and pro-gun candidates. Now they threaten to run primary opponents against these same candidates who express reservations on health care reform. But Republicans do the same thing. When they ran Congress, they browbeat their most moderate members at every opportunity and used their majority on behalf of Terry Schiavo. Now, they coddle Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and yesterday they elected a pro-choice candidate in Massachusetts. Normally, a party needs to lose its majority to regain its bearings. But in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, Barack Obama has an opportunity to make necessary adjustments without paying nearly that drastic a penalty for excess. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both lost entire Congresses. All Obama lost was a single Senate seat, albeit one of great symbolic importance. But a little mea culpa, a little less hubris and a pronounced shift to the center could allow the Democratic Party time to become somewhat more proficient at governing than it has demonstrated over the past year.



Update | 10:10 a.m.

A Party in Denial

Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, is a columnist at Salon.com and the author, most recently, of “Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.”

Reactions to Scott Brown’s victory are predictable and self-serving. Obama loyalists insist it was all about local issues and Coakley’s weaknesses. Right-wing Democrats blame the “left elements in the Party” — who have gotten virtually nothing they’ve wanted the entire year. And most everyone else interprets it as vindication of their pre-existing views.

Obama has failed on his vow to change the way Washington works and that is the party’s greatest liability.

Whatever else is true, last night’s result — along with earlier gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey, polling disasters for Democratic Congressional incumbents, and the bizarre resurgence of a party widely assumed to be dead only a year ago — conclusively proves that something has gone radically wrong for the Democratic Party. One has to be in serious denial not to acknowledge that their approach is not working.

Read more… Some important factors — especially the collapsing economy and exploding unemployment which Obama inherited — were beyond their control. But an electorate that delivered smashing victories to the Democrats in two consecutive national elections — and which had such high hopes for the “change” Obama repeatedly vowed to usher in — is now turning on them. To insist that Obama and party leaders are blameless is to ensure the downward spiral continues. The notion that Obama’s policies are too “liberal” for the country is simply absurd, given that these are exactly the policies on which he successfully campaigned. But the central pledge of the Obama candidacy, beyond any specific issues, was his vow to change the way Washington works. It is his failure to do that which has become the party’s greatest liability. A candidate who railed against secret deals and lobbyist influence negotiated this health care plan in secrecy with industry lobbyists, got caught entering into secret deals with the pharmaceutical industry, agreed to abandon his commitment to drug re-importation and bulk price negotiations in order to please the pharmaceutical lobby, and cavalierly refused to abide by his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open. Worse still, two of the most popular provisions — the public option and Medicare expansion — were jettisoned, leaving the insurance-industry-pleasing provisions as the bill’s dominant features. When one adds to that the subservience of the administration’s top financial officials to Wall Street and the lack of programs designed to aid struggling Americans, the perception has arisen that Democrats are both guardians of the Washington status quo and loyal only to powerful interests. That has allowed the corporatist G.O.P. to masquerade as populists and monopolize populist anger. One significant disadvantage burdening Democrats is that they must accommodate far more ideological diversity than Republicans. A party that has both Ben Nelson and Russ Feingold will be prone to in-fighting. The choice now for the White House is whether to move even further to the right or whether they will finally focus on galvanizing their base. As it always does, Beltway conventional wisdom will insist that they do the former (which may include abandoning health care altogether), but a party that has an already demoralized base demoralizes them further at its peril.

The Democrats’ Learned Timidity

Theda Skocpol is a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, and the author of “Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government,” a book about the failed 1993-94 Clinton heath care overhaul.

Why can’t the Democrats manage to move things forward? Why are they allowing the filibuster to block things when the Republicans did not? Why do Republicans use the filibuster much more than the Democrats did when they were in the substantial minority?

The Democrats haven’t reformed Senate rules that block change because they too love the personal clout those practices give them.

There are no perfect answers. Part of the answer may be the learned timidity and ready-for-defeatism of Democrats, who have not shaped national political or economic narratives since the 1960s. They have forgotten how to make heartfelt arguments, how to play hardball, and are always expecting to cave or surrender. But that is not all of it, and here are a few other considerations:

— Republicans under Bush used 51-vote rules meant for budget items to push through tax cuts for the wealthy. Tax cuts fit these rules better than many aspects of, say, health care reform right now, because a lot of that is regulatory.

Read more… And of course tax cuts are fun for politicians to do. Democrats will be able to use 51-vote rules only if they start breaking things into popular, obvious steps that tax the well-to-do and fund benefits for ordinary people. Democrats have to stop using regulations to do everything indirectly, and turn to policies with clear budgetary implications in order to make reconciliation usable. They ought to be able to do this, but will they? — This brings us to the fact that Democrats have serious internal class divisions in their orientations, networks, and support bases. A lot of them talk to wealthy people all the time (raising checks for re-election) and want to do things for them. Hence, it was easy to get Democrats to do tax cuts. Republicans under Bush actually got a bunch of Democrats to vote for those cuts most times; and many of the rest of the Democrats would have refused to sustain filibusters to block Republican tax cuts under Bush. Even in the majority, Democrats still have many ties to business interests and quietly look for excuses to avoid doing things that offend them. Not being able to act without 60 votes is a ready excuse. — Since Obama’s election, Republicans have been terrified/angry and they are enough of a regionally and ideologically concentrated rump group to work together. They launched the “just say no” strategy and used it to get through the period before Al Franken’s election was confirmed. Republican negativism played great in the media, slowed or blunted reforms in the Senate, and interacted with slow-paced Democratic tactics in Congress to protract health reform bargaining. The public became increasingly turned off and worried, especially since most Americans have never believed that you can insure everyone without paying higher taxes. Bottom line is that, at a certain point, by late summer and early fall, delay and united opposition seemed to be paying off for Republicans, and that of course strengthened resolve to obstruct in the Senate. Even moderates got the message that they would be “primaried” if they crossed over. Now with a Coakley loss, media pundits, led by David Broder, will urge Mr. Obama to compromise and “reach out.” But Republicans, whatever they say, will be even more determined to obstruct, because it works for them electorally. Democrats will need minds and guts to figure this all out, but will they have them? — Democrats are so regionally and ideologically diverse that they not only cannot sustain filibusters when in the minority, they have a hard time getting their act together in the majority, even the near super-majority. What is more, after Al Franken’s election, the media told us the Democrats had 60 Senate votes, and Republicans taunted them with that. But of course they never did. They had Lieberman, a one-man wrecking ball beholden to no party. — Filibusters, finally, used to be costly forms of obstruction. But Senate customs since the 1970s or so have made them easy for the obstructionists — and equally easy, as well as hidden, are things like “individual holds” to prevent votes even when the overwhelming majority is in favor. The Senate is not built for modern governance — though it is perfectly suited to modern media campaigns to obstruct and destroy public action. Democrats in the Senate, with White House backing, could be changing customs to make holds visible and filibusters costly (for example, if senators using holds were identified and holds were made temporary, and if filibusterers had to maintain 40 or more senators present on the floor at all times). But the Democratic Senate leaders don’t take these steps, because secretly many Democratic senators are prima donnas who love the personal clout these practices give them. The best time to have acted was back at the start, when President Obama was more popular. Now it will be harder. — Democrats, in the end, are setting America and their party up to fail, by not figuring out how to move things with huge majorities short of 60 in the Senate. Why vote for them, people will say, if they cannot do anything anyway? Or worse, if they engage in unseemly bargains to buy individual Senators’ votes with measures against the public interest. Good questions. Some say we need a new “constitutional convention.” I completely disagree. The Senate is one of many federal features of U.S. government that spreads out influence across our vast and beautiful nation, and that is fine. It does not bother me that some rules are less than purely majoritarian, that South Carolina has two senators. But those senators should not be able to team up with only a two-fifths group to block all changes permanently. They should be able to slow things down for a few weeks, if they take clear responsibility, but anything more should be supremely costly to them in time and embarrassment. Majority political parties have to use procedural maneuvers, invent new twists, tweak rules, and change customs with the times. Today’s Democrats are not doing that in the Senate for the public good, and Americans have the right to be dismayed with them. Republicans have always unabashedly done this sort of thing, when in the majority or the minority, to further their own partisan purposes. The dirty secret is that modern post-1980 Republicans believe government is the problem, and they are determined to use government’s own rules to keep government from working for most Americans!

How Party Cultures Differ

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Our two major political parties have differences, and they are more than ideological (although they are more ideological now than at any time in our lifetimes). Some of the differences are cultural: Republicans in office tend to be more disciplined, more sensitive to internal ostracism, more willing to stick together.

When Democrats are in the minority, they like to cut deals, even with the other side.

That may be because of a minority mentality; even though Republicans have had a sizable slice of power in Washington over the past couple of decades, an era of 40 straight years (actually, 60 out of 64 years dating from 1930 to 1994) shut out of the House of Representatives, with nearly as dismal results in the Senate, left an imprint. Republicans feel embattled even when in power, and they tend to hunker down together.

To be sure, activist conservatives out in the field don’t show any impulse to hunker down with establishment leaders. Their threats, rarely idle, to take on apostates in primaries provide further reasons for moderate Republicans to join with their conservative colleagues even when their ideological impulses might take them into bipartisan land. And partly as a result of those threats, there are very few moderate Republican lawmakers left in Washington.

Read more… Democrats are more naturally unruly, but also have more moderates in the House and Senate — with numbers that have been expanded in the past two elections as they have made inroads in otherwise Republican districts. But those Democrats do not often face credible primary challenges from activist liberals; there aren’t usually enough in their districts to make the difference. Ron Edmonds/Associated Press Also, Democrats think of themselves more in governing terms — when they are in the minority, many like to cut deals, even if they are with the other side. Look at the contrast between Ted Kennedy, cutting a deal with George W. Bush on a Medicare prescription drug plan, and no Republican willing at all to work with Barack Obama on health reform. Having said that, the fact is that the unusually united Republican minority in 2009 — operating in unison as if it were a parliamentary opposition — has had an effect on Democrats. They have been more disciplined and united in Congress than at any time in the more than 50 years Congressional Quarterly has been tracking votes. And President Obama, as a consequence, has had more success on those votes than any president in a half century. But when Congress is operating as if it were a parliament, and the Senate minority is using obstructionist tactics in an unprecedented way, raising the bar to 60 votes on every issue from routine to major, Democrats need more than perfect unity. Sixty votes in the Senate are not always enough, especially if one of them is 92 years old and in precarious health. Fifty-nine united votes might never be enough.

The Myth of Republican Discipline

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From World War II to the War on Terrorism.”

Democrats continually wonder why their party seems to have so much trouble holding their coalition together. The fact is, any major political coalition is unwieldy and hard to keep intact. It’s a myth that Republicans have had an easier time remaining united.

Republican presidents — from Eisenhower to Nixon to Bush — have also struggled to keep their coalitions together.

When in power, Republicans have always struggled to maintain control. During the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower engaged in fierce battles with Midwestern Republicans who were opposed to excessive foreign intervention and who did not think Eisenhower was doing enough to fight communism at home.

In the 1970s, Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford faced problems of their own. Ronald Reagan, the California governor at the time, and other fellow conservatives railed against the policy of détente, claiming that the G.O.P. was too willing to negotiate with the Soviets over arms control.