A well-known liberal blogger, commenting on Al Franken's capture of the 60th Senate seat in the Democrat caucus, notes that Democrats must now make a choice of strategies: Whether to see how long they can hold their majority, or whether to see how much of their agenda they can achieve with it.
Now suppose, for a moment, that conservatives held the White House, the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Do you think they would hesitate, for even a moment, to commence with a conservative agenda because they might lose the majority?
Of course, conservatives do have a natural advantage here: We don't seek to govern. When your goal is to set people free, you obviously aren't concerned with holding onto power for power's sake. When I got done with government, quite frankly, there wouldn't be much authority left to rule with anyway.
But even without that understanding, a conservative doesn't worry that genuine conservatism would cost votes. In fact, I'm so confident in conservative principles that I'd actually expect a strong conservative government to gain seats, to further solidify its majority by just carrying through with its promises. Why on earth would voters throw out conservatism?
Compare that to this popular blogger. Presumably he is as sure about liberalism as I am about conservatism. Yet even so, he recognizes that what liberals would really like to do with government would not be popular with voters. He knows that too much liberalism will cost the left seats.
Now I don't know about you, but if I thought my agenda wasn't exactly what America wanted -- if I thought the public could only stomach so much of my party's platform -- then it seems to me I'd have much more important questions to ask than whether we should seek to hold onto our majority or use it to advance our causes.
Like, for example, "Why are what America votes for us to do and what we would like to do with America mutually exclusive concepts?"
Maybe Democrats should be asking that question first.
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