By now, we’ve had a whole week to absorb what we might call the “Great Cave,” and its rather stunning ripple effects. We’ve watched the story morph from a devastating betrayal by Democrats to a devastating train wreck for Republicans, all in just a few news cycles. At every point I’ve tried to make sense of what’s happened, though it hardly seems to matter anymore. The effect has overtaken the cause. But here, nonetheless, is my take. Yes, it’s all speculation on my part, and we may never get the whole story, but still. When it first came out that eight senators — seven Democrats, one independent — were voting with Republicans to end the shutdown, the howls of agony could be heard coast-to-coast. And for good reason. It appeared that these senators were cravenly accepting defeat, just as victory seemed in their grasp. But was it really? Victory would have meant, more than anything else, saving the Obamacare subsidies, whose expiration will soon push health in...
I n the run-up to last Tuesday’s election, it was hard to avoid the overpaid pundits repeating the oldest and laziest clichés in the pundit handbook: “Democrats need to move to the center.” “Democrats are out of touch with voters.” “Democrats can’t just talk about Trump and expect to win.” As it turns out, they don’t, they’re not, and they most definitely can, respectively. But while the election blew those clichés to bits, the “Democrats-in-disarray” story remains a staple of modern journalism. In the week since the election the same pundits, not content to have been wrong before it, have moved on to stories with headlines like “ Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think” and “Election Wins Tuesday Won’t Ease a Divided Democratic Party’s Troubles.” One of the more obvious purveyors of this slop has been, no surprise, the New York Times , which is trying desperately to gin up a Democrat-versus-Democrat narrative to carry them into the next ele...