Out of step with the blogosphere

I admit it. I haven't weighed in on the Feingold censure brouhaha because my personal reaction has been the polar opposite of that of the rest of the leftish blogosphere.

But look, the cavalry has arrived, in the form of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece by Hendrik Hertzberg. He gives voice to exactly what I've been thinking, and he says it much better than I ever could:

Feingold sprang his resolution on his Democratic colleagues without a word of advance warning or consultation...Feingold focussed on the wiretapping because that is the one area where the Administration has admitted—indeed, boasted of—overriding a particular law. But it is also practically the only area of security policy where Bush retains some lingering public support. Feingold has “energized the base,” but to what end? Apart from establishing a beachhead for his own fledgling Presidential campaign, he has succeeded mainly in deflecting the anger of a good many Democrats from Bush to—well, to “the Democrats.”

Everyone complains that the Democrats have no clear, unified position on Iraq, and they don’t. But what this analysis ignores is the fact that they can’t. Without either a federal power center or an imminent Presidential election—without a President, a Speaker of the House, a Senate Majority Leader, or a Presidential nominee—no institutional instrument or leader has the clout to impose a consensus. Democrats advocate a spectrum of more or less similar positions—an array, not a disarray—ranging from Representative John Murtha’s call for rapid disengagement to the detailed “strategic redeployment” plan backed by the Center for American Progress. But the Bush Administration has created a dilemma to which a satisfactory solution, no matter what new policies are adopted, has become vanishingly remote. As for the Democrats, their point is more implicit than explicit. It is that if they had had power they would not have made the same strategic, prudential, and moral errors that Bush and the Republicans have made, and that if they are entrusted with power they will not be wedded to a manifestly failing policy. Their job is to win power without either being completely cynical or talking themselves into a box that would make it impossible for them to exercise it wisely once they got it.

Bravo.