, Columnist
'Disarray' Is Preface to Power for Democrats
The last time the party was this divided, it took over Congress.
In 2004, a political unknown.
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"The Democrats are in disarray." That was the first line of a classic Hendrik Hertzberg column in March 2006 in the New Yorker. Hertzberg didn't actually believe his own sentence; he made it clear that he was just parroting what many of the in-the-know political reporters and pundits were then saying.
He went on to explain that parties out of power, as the Democrats then were, are always a bit like driftwood, bobbing on the political seas, waiting for the right storm surge to bring them to shore.