I Cogitate

"THERE'S PREACHING TO THE CHOIR, AND THEN THERE'S TELLING A Boston ballroom full of Democrats in the high summer of a Republican president's low poll ratings, "What we need to do is to develop an understanding of how hard it is to get by in a Republican America," as everybody cheers and the drummer in the band in the corner drops a rimshot, just so nobody misses the point. There's preaching to the choir and then there's leading it in song. "We can't win," says Howard Dean, "if we don't fight." And there is another rimshot and another burst of applause.

It ought to be a good day to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Less than a year after the best-financed and best-organized presidential campaign in the party's history struck a rock in Ohio and sank, and less than a year after the Democratic Party seemed locked into a permanent minority status in both houses of Congress, the victorious Republicans appeared to be disincorporating. In the week before Howard Dean came to this town, a series of national surveys showed the job approval of President Bush plunging into the ominous polling netherworld where once were lost Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1974. (On the weekend of Dean's appearance, a New York Times/CBS News poll put the president's approval number at 42 percent, or 30 points lower than that enjoyed by Bill Clinton the day after his impeachment.) Moreover, the president's primary domestic policy initiative - a plan to remake Social Security - seemed graveyard dead, and his primary foreign policy initiative was going so sour that a skeptic named Chuck Hagel had begun saying flatly that the United States was losing the war in Iraq, an opinion that aligned the Republican senator with the 59 percent of respondents who opposed the war in a Gallup survey last month.

In addition, the president faced open revolt from within the moderate wing of his own party over his nominations of several judges and of John Bolton to be the ambassador to the United Nations. The majority leader of the House of Representatives became the apple of a prosecutor's eye, and Congress in general faced polling numbers even worse than those of the president, in large part because its members had helped turn the tragically prolonged death of a woman in Florida into a festival for public fruitcakes. Undaunted, the president's brother, the governor of Florida, had responded to the release of the details of the unfortunate woman's autopsy by calling for yet another "investigation" into "unanswered questions."

"They say they want smaller government," says Howard Dean. "But their government is just big enough to fit into Terri Schiavo's bed."

Another rimshot. More applause. It should be a good time to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

But, of course, it's not."

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