The data available is so vast you can make whatever point you want. And even the hard data misses the point, a lot happens in the rhetoric, fighting, and so on that isn't even captured by the votes, bills passed, and vetos.
One hard data point, because of Democrats we got the first minimum wage increase in a long time recently. Could that have happened with a Republican congress? Is it unimportant? That and other things have been hard work. There are razor thin democratic majorities, especially in the Senate, and many of those democrats aren't even "liberal" let alone "progressive." There have been 43 Republican fillibusters in the past 7 months. Republicans have lots of levers to pull, and they're pulling them all, including redefining executive privilege in an even worse way.
If you say that the Democrat performance in ending the War is abysmal, you overlook not only all those fillibusters and levers, but also the fact that there's a growing out-of-Iraq-now caucus of dozens, almost entirely democrats with folks like Kucinich and Lee who would cut the war funding now. I gnashed my teeth way back in Feb when Pelosi pulled the "no funds to attack Iran" clause out. I though that should have been easy, what sane person wants to attack Iran? Ah AIPAC. But the truth was, she didn't have the votes anyway, and she did have a minor victory in getting a bill to the president with a withdrawal schedule in it. That it actually happened I found hard to believe. Of course, it's all been downhill since there, but there's a big difference between what Democrats and Republicans are saying and doing about it. Democrats continue pushing to end war, and Republicans have almost entirely been resisting that using every tool at their disposal, and with the Imperial Presidency that was created long ago, you simply can't expect much.
Yeah, Clinton attacked Serbia, but it didn't cost much, and even many liberals and progressives defended it. (What I opposed mainly was the way it was done..picky me.) I can't believe a Democratic President would have started a hot war with Iraq (the cold war was doing so nicely, heh), slashed taxes on the wealthy (Clinton raised them), and many other things that easily add up to many trillions of dollars. Even a "centrist" (aka conservative) president like Clinton. Now we're in an incredibly deep hole compared with where we could have been. There's your dime. I regret my protest vote for Nader. But I think I learned something. It makes a serious difference who wins or loses. That's not the whole story, for sure, but if the eviler person wins we're headed down to hell like we are now with no end in sight and nobody to complain to either. Like Republicans with Vietnam, it seems like many leftists haven't learned the lesson of 2000. Chomsky has.
There was a big change in general Democratic consciousness in the 1970's. The Democratic Congress then cut the last funds for war with Vietnam under President Ford. I know republicans who still say we could have (and should have) won, and that we didn't was all the Democrats fault for losing. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld were apparently in that camp.
Now it looks like Clinton is likely to be nominated, and may well become President unless Bush suspends the constitution. We have to think either how we can actually get someone better, or at least make some kind of difference, if you're even interested in bourgeois politics. And if you're not, you please me more by not being involved at all rather than pushing those who might vote for a lesser evil away from it. That Nader got money from republicans in 2000 was shocking but hardly surprising.
I was pleased that Obama said he'd at least talk to Chavez. Hillary said that would be a bad signal. I'm thinking of sending Obama $25 right now and whenever he says something better than Hillary. We need to reinforce those small differences.
Charles Peterson San Antonio, TX
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