Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: Where’s the Democratic terrors GOP feared?

On National Review Online, an unfunny parody written from the point of view of Osama Bin Laden suggested a Democratic America would be a happy place for the al-Qaida leader: “I hear Democratic members of Congress mocking [Bush],” the parody Osama wrote, “I see protesters in the street calling him a war criminal, I read The New York Times, and I think to myself that sanity might at last prevail in the United States.”

Obviously, some of this doom-and-gloom is just good campaigning, but on Fox, “conservative attack dog” Karen Hanretty admitted her fellow conservatives legitimately “fear a Democratic majority.”

And right-wing cable TV host John Gibson, in a just-pre-election conversation with Democratic strategist Laura Schwartz, revealed his darkest worries about the new order:

Gibson: But you’re saying that Charlie Rangel isn’t going to end Bush’s tax cuts?

Schwartz: That is not on the table yet.

Gibson: John Conyers is not going to impeach Bush?

Schwartz: No, absolutely not. Impeachment’s completely off the table.

Gibson: Well, what about all these investigations?

Well, what about impeaching Bush? Things haven’t turned out the way Republicans feared, at all. Since assuming power, Pelosi’s Democrats have been amazingly cautious.

Aggressive, muck-raking inquisitions — aside from Walter Reed and the unfairly-fired U.S. attorneys, which were dropped right into Democrats’ laps — have proceeded slowly and carefully.

On Iraq, the Democratic Congress’s mood is, unbelievably, more hesitant than the general population’s: Kentucky freshman Democrat John Yarmuth estimated to me that he hears more about Iraq now than when he was campaigning — and almost all pleas to get us out.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that “[e]ven in her conservative Kansas district, calls and letters to freshman House Democrat Nancy Boyda show a constituency overwhelmingly ready for U.S. troops to come home from Iraq.”

But the Democratic caucus is still wary of a hard charge on Iraq, with many members hesitant to actually touch funds, and will proceed haltingly in the months to come.

Why haven’t Democrats come into power swinging, as Republicans warned they would? We tend to think power makes people more extreme — that it empowers those who finally grasp it to stop hedging and pandering and do what they really want to do.

In the Republican view of the Democrats, let their id, their secret love of “San Francisco values,” take over.)

This is certainly true in tyrannies, where despots like Mao or Robert Mugabe do wilder things in power than their supporters had imagined. But it’s much less true in democracies.

In America, power tends to dull and deaden ideological zeal. Take Republican rule after the Revolution in ’94: Most plans to abolish this and that department never worked out; less government morphed into the same government, and then more government.

Ambitions were tempered once those firebrands took their seats in the Capitol.

There’s another lesson — beyond just that most politicians, even the leftier ones, are basically moderate — for the Republicans here.

What’s the great fear causing Republicans to bellyache about their top three presidential contenders? That, when they enter office, they’ll stop pandering and become who they really are: McCain, a bizarre, untrustworthy, unhinged maverick who flip-flops and crusades to quash constitutional freedoms for no apparent reason; Romney, a pro-choice, pro-gay Massachusetts pseudo-liberal who worships a weird God; Giuliani, a home-wrecking, gun-hating New Yorker who enjoys dressing like a woman and pushing Donald Trump’s face into his costume breasts.

Forsaking these three, conservatives go for a hard-liner like Representative Duncan Hunter, who’s been inching up in the polls.

But have these fans ever seen Hunter? The man is so stilted, so uncharismatic, so obviously single-minded (more “security”! More!) that it’s hard for me to believe he was elected a lowly congressman, much less has a chance to be president.

McCain, Romney, and even Giuliani will probably continue tempering their more unusual impulses, continue to move towards the basic viewpoint of the majority of their voters – the same way they have during the campaign so far.

If you like Romney now, but didn’t like him in ‘94, why think he’ll change direction and move backwards again?

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.