5.

If Allen and Harris’s reporting is correct, the Democrats have convinced themselves that their agenda during the past two years is the moral equivalent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which may have cost their party dearly at the polls but was the right thing to do and was of such transcendent, transformational significance as to justify any degree of unpopularity.

Maybe that’s the verdict history will render (for the record, I doubt it). But in the here and now, the people who crafted and drove the 2009-2010 legislative agenda—including the cap-and-trade bill, reportedly one of Pelosi’s top personal priorities—are not the ones who paid the political price for it. What’s the logic of patiently rebuilding a Democratic majority—for which Pelosi deserves a considerable share of the credit—only to embark on a strategy seemingly calculated to destroy it? And why should the kinds of Democrats without whom no Democratic majority is possible expect anything better in the future?

This decision was the victory of inside baseball over common sense, and no amount of spin can change that.