My last post generated some feedback from folks I respect. The point I want to respond to is that the wedge isn’t meant to wedge far-right tea-partiers from the Republican ticket; rather it’s to demonstrate to persuadable independents that Republicans are nuts and unworthy of office.

I think that’s a fair point, and I think this can be one minimally effective tactic in the Democratic arsenal; the problem is that this is all that’s come from any of the committees re: electoral strategy for 2010. And this is a pretty thin reed to hang for Democrats to hang their hopes upon. It depends on the media picking up your message of Republican flip-flopping and taking it to those persuadable independents. Or, in the alternative, it depends on some pretty strong Democratic ads in the immediate run-up to the election.

Aside from the fact that Democratic media shops are famously inept when it comes to making ads, I just don’t think the flip-flop message, no matter how starkly portrayed, will be an effective parry to the “incompetent Democrats that can’t solve nay of the nation’s problems when they control the entire government” message that has already taken root.

Without a strong legislative session (something that’s pretty rare in election years, and probably even more rare when Republicans are willing to use every procedural tactic in the books to minimize the quantity of work that can be done in a year that will be shortened by campaign considerations as it is) to run on, the “incompetent Democrats” narrative will have another 6 months to sink its roots deeper into the national consciousness. By the time Democrats break out their commercials, opinions are going to be pretty well set.

Democrats need to either break out the bludgeons and furiously ram their agenda through the Senate or suffer the (deserved) consequences. Harry Reid had 60 votes and seems to have not even given a passing nod to the idea of party discipline. The rest of the caucus kept this ineffective leader at the helm, even as he followed Lincoln, Landrieu, Bayh, Baucus, Lieberman and Nelson over the electoral cliff. The idea that a core group of progressive Senators couldn’t get together and make clear that no Agriculture bill would pass if they didn’t get substantive health care is still something I just don’t understand.

The last election was nationalized. People expected Obama and the Democratic Congress to keep the promises they made. They broke the trust they had asked for during campaign season. And why? Well, as far as I can tell, they bent over backwards to appease a bunch of people that hate them no matter what they do. They need to get back the the reality-based world the rest of us live in and start producing if they expect to minimize losses in 2010.