Judis on the Congress

I think John Judis's points in his TNR article critiquing the leadership of the Democratic Congress is important, but I don't think the political comparison he makes--the anchor of his analysis, actually--is a particularly helpful way to understand the problem:

If Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want guidance, they should look back at what the Democrats did during the presidential term of George H.W. Bush. The Democrats had a brilliant Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, and a competent House speaker, Tom Foley, who generally deferred to Mitchell. Mitchell and Foley forced Bush to veto popular bills that also enjoyed some Republican support in Congress. They showed up Bush as a heartless extremist and split his own party. And they handed Democrat Bill Clinton a platform on which to run in the fall of 1992.

This doesn't quite work because--on the big issues, mainly--the problem isn't confined to the paper-thin Democratic majority. It's also the intensity of the antagonism between the two parties. On the smaller issues, this Bush has proven less willing to veto things than one might have predicted after his father's four years in office. As a result, a lot of pretty good (but slightly smaller) bills will soon be passed, have been passed, or have already been signed. They've just mostly flown beneath the radar.