Quote of the Day: Al Franken, Democratic and Republican Party Discipline

Our political Quote of the Day comes from a must-read-in-full piece by Dick Polman, as he notes that Al Franken finally being declared the winner in the hotly contested Minnesota race will most assuredly not mean easy sailing for Democrats — and could foreshadow problems for President Barack Obama:

Unless Obama can somehow twist arms in the tradition of Lyndon Johnson, it’s hard to see how he can herd the 60 cats. And not even LBJ, if resurrected today, could twist arms the way he did back in the Great Society heyday of 1965. Johnson cut deals with recalcitrant Democratic senators by putting pork projects in their districts, but those “earmarks” are politically verboten today.

The bottom line is that Democrats are notoriously prone to indiscipline – unlike the Republicans, by the way. George W. Bush reached the White House after having lost the popular vote, and he only had 50 senators on side; nevertheless, he and they governed in lockstep, acting as if he’d won a conservative mandate in 2000, and wound up enacting several major tax cuts. Republicans are simply better at taking direction from the top; by contrast, the last collaboration between a super-majority Democratic Senate and a Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) was a disaster.

Franken’s arrival is already emboldening the Democrats’ liberal wing….The stakes have gone up, expectations have been raised, and the Democratic base will be less tolerant of failure. The arrival of the Senate’s first career humorist has actually lowered the prospects for comic relief.