Dems Rapidly Becoming the Minnesota Vikings of Politics

[Cue John Facenda voice]: With little left to lose and even less to gain, Reason's own Tim Cavanaugh began prognosticating with the protean power of a latter-day Jimmy the Greek while mouth-breathing with all the suet-choked grace of a phlegmatic Jack Germond. As Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid stumbled to the scrimmage line deep in their own terrritory, pinning their electoral hopes on a Hail Mary play involving disgraced lobbyists and banished GOP pols rather than anything resembling a policy agenda, the Democrats' troubles grew ever more grave on the frozen tundra that is mid-term politics: Even their own supporters are openly saying that the Donkey Party's hopes for evening the score in Congress this fall are going down faster than a Clinton-era White House intern:

The Democratic congressional leadership (is that a oxymoron?) still cowers when it sees its Cold War shadow, a ghost drawn by Republicans and regularly re-inked by the Washington-based Democratic neo-conservatives who gave us John Kerry and who me-too'ed Bush on Iraq. They can't seem to understand that Democrats have won the baby boom generation-dominated electoral center on socio-cultural issues, not at all like the Depression-era center that elected Nixon and Reagan.

So, instead of boldly opposing the madness in Iraq and firing up the base with unapologetic opposition to the Talibanic wing of the GOP, Democratic leaders have brilliantly concluded they can win in 2006 by hammering away at The Hammer and his friend, Mr. Abramoff…

That's not what [voters] are going to vote on 10 months from now, when Abramoff is forgotten and/or conflated into a pox on incumbents in both houses and on both parties.

While Republicans are prepared to beat the brains out of Democrats with taxes and terrorism, my party apparently intends to win by default. But what else is new?

That's from an op-ed in the DC Examiner by Terry Michael, former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, current head of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, and proprietor of a blog titled "Thoughts from a Libertarian Democrat." Whole thing here.