The Growth Of Party Discipline
An aside from James Fallows that’s worth an essay all its own:
Compared with the last two times a Democrat was in the White House—during Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s and Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s—I found Democrats much more careful about criticizing their own party’s president during an election year. It’s not that Democrats have become so much more disciplined, nor, obviously, that they have no complaints, but rather that they seem more worried about the risks of helping the other side. I asked someone who has been close to Obama if I could interview him about his experiences. He said, “I’m not going to say anything that might hurt during the campaign.” At the Capitol, I asked one prominent Democratic legislator what he had learned about Obama as a leader and a person that the general public did not know. He sat for nearly a full minute and then replied, “I would rather not say.” But other people I spoke with—from Congress and inside and outside the administration—volunteered sincere-seeming flattering accounts of the Obama they had observed in informal discussions and strategy sessions.
He says it’s not because Democrats have become more disciplined, but I’d say this is constitutive of discipline. A larger share of prominent Democrats think of themselves as Democratic partisans who have an obligation to boost the fortune of the Democratic Party rather than pursue other kinds of personal or professional goals.
