Dems' Fightin' Words: Democrats debate policy quite nicely. But until they embrace politics, become proud partisans and figure out who they are, they will be continually clobbered.

There it was, the first Fourth of July after September 11: The majestic swell of a patriotism associated more with the era of the Andrews Sisters than the age of Destiny's Child. The ritual exultations of American values. The worry, yes, that something bad might happen somewhere, but even this concern only enhanced the solemnity of the moment. A splendid time, in other words, to be a president with a 70 percent approval rating.
But the moment was fleeting. For this was the very point at which the spokes starting coming off the wheels for George W. Bush. No Democrat would ever have summoned up the courage or imagination to plan it that way. For that we needed Paul Krugman, the merrily insubordinate New York Times op-ed columnist, who chose July 2 as the iron-hot moment to familiarize Times readers with the now-infamous Harken Energy stock sale.

Many elected Democrats had never even heard of it until the Krugman piece, but that didn't stop them from moving quickly to seize the moment. By July 7, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was on Face the Nation, demanding the release of Securities and Exchange Commission documents relating to Harken and taking, symbolically, an adventurous and important step: The Democrats' first real stab at cutthroat politics post September 11.

Ever since, a lot of the same people who spent eight years trying to pin everything up to homicide on the Clintons have been bawling about the unfairness of it all. But the chief complaint from liberal partisans about the newfound mettle of Daschle and his fellow Democrats is, what on earth took them so long? While it's satisfying to see Democrats playing some offense now, it's a fact that, over the past nine months, the party has been afraid of its own shadow. Let's put it as bluntly as possible: Never in modern American history has a party so failed its core constituents as the Democratic Party has during this period.

This wallflower pose has not been an accident, but a conscious strategy. For months now, Democratic operatives have debated whether to go after Bush personally and drive his poll numbers down to obtain an advantage in the midterm elections. Until recently, Bush stood at 75 percent, 80 percent, even higher. What on earth could Democrats do about numbers like that? They did some polling and found out -- phew! -- that they didn't need to go after Bush's numbers, that the president lacked coattails, that voters in discrete congressional districts and states were unlikely to cast their votes for Congress based on how they felt about Bush. There were internal arguments over this question -- some very much wanted to go after Bush more aggressively and personally -- but the numbers said what they said, and Democratic operatives concluded that they could succeed this fall without the risk of going after the president.