Greg Sargent doesn’t think the Weiner rant is good politics:
Dems would be far better served if they kept calmly repeating that Republicans want government to fail, in order to breed cynicism and to get voters to give up on the idea that government works for them.
By the way, there’s precedent for this. Remember when former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle erupted on the Senate floor in 2002 in response to Bush’s rank politicization of national security in the runup to the midterm elections? That didn’t work, either.
To be clear, I’m all for the kind of passion Weiner is showing here, but let’s direct it properly. Don’t get into a shouting match about procedure. As emotionally satisfying as it may be to watch, raging against the GOP opposition machine’s successful efforts to tie Dems in knots just makes Dems look whiny, weak and impotent.
I suspect that nothing that you do on the floor of Congress, even beating another Congressman nearly to death, makes very much difference politically. Personally, I enjoyed the rant because I think Weiner made a good point. But I have to file “if only Democrats showed passion” with “if only America really tried to defeat its enemies” and “if only Obama used the 11-dimensional bully pulpit to say `pass the damn bill'” in the category of Green Lantern political theories.
Democrats will get hosed this fall because of a shitty economy, not because of their failure to get angry (though I think you can argue that if Chuck Schumer were running the Senate and sticking horse heads in people’s beds, things might be different, but maybe that’s just another Green Lantern theory too). And as Democrats become a dominant majority party over the next 10 years or so, it will be because Republicans alienated all the non-white voters, not because Democrats grew a spine (except to the extent that taking a sane course on immigration can be considered growing a spine).