I think Glenn Greenwald is quite right about this. The Democratic Party has spent the last few years more or less conspicuously failing to deliver on every single one of its campaign promises. I count cap-and-trade, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the end of the Iraq War, a restoration of civil liberties, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, the end of domestic spying, the end of the Bush tax cuts, financial reform, and (possibly health care). And those are just the big ones.
Indeed, on quite a number of those the Democrats have rather obviously been AIDING the injustices that they campaigned against. They legalized ex post facto most of the worst excesses of Bush’s spying, and have been sticking to Bush’s plan for withdrawal from Iraq. Congressional Democrats have been some of the worst impediments to closing Guantanamo and enacting financial reform. Let’s not even discuss health care. Long story short, if Congressional Democrats go into the election of 2010 having delivered exactly nothing that they’ve promised in their election campaigns of the last four years, they’re obviously going to lose badly. Any politician who so badly misjudged the electorate probably deserves to be fired for rank incompetence.